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l^RKSENTEU BY 



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THE 

THREE CONVENTIONS 

METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES, PRINCIPIA 
METAPHYSICA, AND COMMENTARY 



BY 

DENIS SAURAT 

n 




LINCOLN MAC VEAGH 

THE DIAL PRESS 

NEW YORK • MCMXXVI 



55 



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Copyright, 1926, by 
The Biajl Press, Inc. 



SIR 



THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS 
eiNSHAMTON AND NEW YORK 



CONTENTS 

METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 
Ontology 

PAQB 

The Actual and the Inactual 3 

Feeling — Concentration — Creation 11 

The Individual 16 

The Universe, Men and Ideas 21 

Cosmology 

The Language of Matter 26 

Epistemology 29 

Evil 35 

The Three Conventions: — 

The Material Convention 40 

The Moral Convention 40 

The Metaphysical Convention 40 

Psychology 

The Self 45 

The Rhythm of Being: 

Fall and Resurrection 49 

Into the World of Ideas 54 

EsCHATOLOGY 

Destiny 59 

The Ideas 64 

[iii] 



CONTENTS 

PAGB 

PRINCIPIA METAPHYSICA 

Principia Metaphysica: A Commentary 

COMPLEMENTARY DIALOGUES 

Vices 117 

The Presence of the Ideas 120 

Indetermination 125 



[iv] 



PREFACE 

So long as we conceive the world to be only in the 
process of Becoming, so long will it be inevitable that 
all our world-conceptions be in constant flux. A 
world that never is but always to be cannot remain 
stable enough for a single moment to allow even of 
description, let alone of definition and interpretation; 
and a statement approximately true today may be 
anything but true tomorrow. Metaphysics and Phi- 
losophy, in these circumstances, are not so much as 
even guesses at truth, since the truth about a process 
of Becoming, if it be no more than that, can only be 
known when the process is complete, that is to say, 
when all life has ceased. They are, at best, a kind of 
meteorological prediction, but in a field vastly more 
complex than that of weather and, in consequence, 
at a vastly greater disadvantage than common mete- 
orology. If, as is too generally assumed by modern 
science, what we call life is only Becoming, there is 
small wonder that Metaphysics and Philosophy 
proper should be regarded as fancies unworthy of 
serious attention. 

On the other hand, if we accept the classical view 
that the process of Becoming is not the Becoming 
of Reality, but only of our perception of Reality; in 

[V] 



PREFACE 

other words, that Reality always is, and that our 
appreciation of it is alone a process, — many things, 
now necessarily unintelligible and meaningless, be- 
come at least potentially intelligible. Knowledge, in 
short, becomes possible on the assumption that there 
is something to know, not merely in a remote future 
when Reality has become, but here and now. If 
Reality is the ground-pattern of Becoming, then we 
have not to wait for the consummation of all things 
to discover it. In any given phase of Becoming the 
pattern Reality is exemplified; and a superior per- 
ception today or, in fact, at any moment in history, 
could divine the pattern ages in advance of the 
general perception of mankind. 

The consequences of such a discovery of the 
ground-pattern of Reality are obvious. Things could 
be given their proper place in relation to the whole; 
and truth would be comparable to mathematics. Be- 
hind the phenomena of Becoming would be percep- 
tible the noumena of Being, truth behind fact, ideas 
behind life. And in relation to the complete pattern 
the various categories of experience and experiment 
could be placed with theoretically mathematical pre- 
cision and certainty. 

That this is by far the most important object of 
thought is evident from two considerations. Science 
today may be said to be advancing in all directions 
and therefore in none, for want of precisely the true 
conception of the whole which a competent Meta- 
jphysic or Philosophy can alone provide. And it is 

[vi] 



PREFACE 

doomed to wander and be lost in the endless laby- 
rinths of Becoming unless some Ariadne, with the 
plan of the maze before her, presents science with the 
guiding thread. 

In practical life, no less than in science, the need of 
a true view of the whole is perhaps the greatest need 
of our day. Psycho-analysis has revealed the fact 
that our characteristic, emotional attitude towards 
life is determined by our conception of life. Such 
as we conceive life to be we feel it to be; and as we 
feel it to be we act and move and manifest our being. 
To quote an Indian writer, if I conceive a coiled rope 
lying on my path to be a snake, I shall feel and act 
accordingly. And in the infinitely wider field of hu- 
man existence if we, as men, mistake life for what it is 
not, conceive it as an unknowable Becoming in place 
of a Reality knowable in Becoming, the attitude 
evoked by the image will impel us to acts of corre- 
spondent error. Life being one thing, our false 
imagination of it becomes the parent of everything 
false. The specifically pathological cases of the psy- 
choanalysts are only the extreme forms of an almost 
universal pathology. 

I know of nothing in literature, outside of certain 
Sanskrit text-books impossible of intelligible trans- 
lation, to equal in precision and concise compre- 
hensiveness the present essay by Professor Saurat. 
Ten years ago his contributions to the "New Age" 
acquainted English readers with the fact that a 
notable thinker, with an astonishing grasp of English, 

[vii] 



PREFACE 

had appeared in France; and as, one by one, his 
various studies appeared, it was evident that Pro- 
fessor Saurat's process of Becoming was the phenome- 
non of a Reality which sooner or later would demand 
expression in a Metaphysic. And the present work 
is the evidence. 

A. R. Orage 



[viii] 



NOTE 

These are not discussions between antagonistic minds, 
but rather impressions of three Intelligences, simulta- 
neously watching the infinite procession of facts and ideas. 
Philosophy studies the realm of the possible, is a search 
for the probabilities that may explain experience. It is 
therefore essential for the thinker to mark as precisely as 
he can what degree of aflirmation he attaches to each idea. 
Continual dogmatism deceives both the reader and the 
writer, for it misrepresents thought, whose creations are 
mostly hypotheses. Rather than three characters, the 
psychologist, the metaphysician and the poet are three 
degrees of probability. The psychologist states facts, the 
metaphysician hypotheses, the poet mere possibilities. 
Every man has in himself those three Intelligences. Ac- 
cording to the freedom and power of his imagination, he 
gives more or less credit to one or other of them. But 
those that do not command his trust often nevertheless 
lead him, and, in any case, play in his life their har- 
monious part. 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 



ONTOLOGY 

THE ACTUAL AND THE INACTUAL 

He gave man speech, and speech created thought, 
Which is the measure of the Universe. 

Shelley (Prom. Unbound). 

The Psychologist: The first condition of the 
existence of thought is to be incomplete. 

From any object several ideas come together to 
the mind; feelings immediately mingle with them; 
and, simultaneously, numerous possibilities of action 
crowd into the soul. But, although we can at the 
same moment have many thoughts in our conscious- 
ness, we can put only one into words. We can think 
with precision of only one at a time. 

Thus, in any sentence shaped in our minds, each 
word stands for an infinite series of facts, which it 
is impossible for us to picture completely in detail. 

This succession of abstractions is made possible 
only through language. If we had to proceed by di- 
rect vision, we should have to imagine exactly first 
one particular fact, in given circumstances, with all 
its manifold aspects, which even the plastic arts 
hardly succeed in doing. 

And for each step in the progress of the sentence 
[3] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

we should have to add one more series of mind- 
pictures and, our imagination failing to retain them 
all, thought would be lost in the chaos of facts. 

But we give a name to first one group of abstrac- 
tions, then another. This stands as a clear mark, 
so we are no longer obliged to imagine, for a fact, 
the infinite series of its aspects. 

But we have named incomplete series — mere pos- 
sibilities of unrealised images: that alone enables us 
to stop somewhere; that alone enables us to think. 

The Metaphysician: Language has created 
thought, abstracting it from feeling, sensation and 
desire. 

There are, therefore, in each thought, two parts: 
What is expressed we shall call the Actual; 
What remains unexpressed, the Inactual. 

The Psychologist: Words drive thought out of 
the mind: It is impossible to think while one speaks. 
That is the absorbing power of the Actual : the con- 
dition of its creative power: it drives from its 
presence all that is not itself. 

The first intuition of anything comprehends the 
Inactual; language expresses only the Actual, and 
drives down intuition. 

But language is always preceded by intuition. 
Thought is not, first and immediately, language, al- 
though it is only perceived as language. 

If we meditate upon a problem, sometimes, all at 
once, there is a sudden illumination : we have found 
the solution; then, instantaneously, it disappears. 

[4] 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 

For one second we have been satisfied, the next we are 
disappointed: not in the solution, but because the 
solution, clearly revealed for one instant, has disap- 
peared before being expressed, and thus is lost. 
There remains with us the impression that we were 
in possession of the solution for a moment. 

Now language is a recent thing in us, as compared 
with matter. Our material visions of our intuitions, 
our external perceptions, are therefore much more 
rapid than our translation of them into language. 
And yet hesitation seems to exist in matter also: 
we have seen something, and then again we have 
not. 

The Metaphysician: What, then, is intuition? 
A modification of our desires, of our Inactual? 

The Psychologist: Language is an obstacle to 
the simultaneity of facts in our consciousness. It 
expresses only one fact at a time. And that one, in 
sole possession of consciousness, becomes, at that 
moment, stronger than the others. 

That which is expressed is truer than before. 

The Metaphysician: Expression influences real- 
ity, forces and changes it; that is the power of the 
Actual. 

A form, once created, creates its matter. Vague 
and indeterminate being, which is the stuff of the 
world, comes and moulds itself in all created forms. 

Ideas once expressed become true: little by little 
reality agglomerates round them. 

The Psychologist: Sometimes. 
[5] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

The Metaphysician: Thus thought has created 
being. 

Language has created thought, by differentiating 
it from feeling. 

The Poet: Thought has created man, by differ- 
entiating him from other beings. 

The Psychologist: An unexpected question is 
put to us, about something we have known or seen. 
We begin our answer without knowing what we are 
going to say. For some sentences we proceed, in 
the dark, not knowing what we shall say next. 

Then, all at once, the idea comes, and the clear 
answer. 

For instance, in extempore speaking, a train of 
commonplace ideas awakens others in us, and some- 
times original ones. 

And yet one cannot think clearly while speaking; 
while we are saying something our words absorb our 
thought. But beneath this state, of which we are 
conscious, we feel our minds moving about, search- 
ing in all directions, and all at once, without any 
possibility of reflection, the idea appears. 

The Metaphysician: The Actual has appealed 
to the Inactual. Form creates: words in motion have 
called upon ideas, which come. But the ideas must 
have been in the mind already or are such as the 
mind would have created, had it been able to reflect 
consciously. 

The Metaphysician (again): Reality is formed 
by a collaboration : by a convention. 

[6] 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 

That which many accept is tme: it has a power 
in the world, even over those who do not accept it. 
And there is no other kind of truth. 

Hence the function of the masses : they render true 
the ideas which men of genius conceive. 

Truth is thus in a process of construction. 

All beings, drawn from the same origin by similar 
desires, address themselves together to similar enter- 
prises, and help one another in their expression of 
themselves. 

The Poet: Even non-human beings have a share 
in that collaboration : the earth, the stars, the plants, 
the elements, and so on. 

The Poet (again): An idea has power, even 
though it be not true, through the very fact of its 
being conceived. For it may be subtle, high and 
precious without being true or even intense: then its 
sole presence will change universal opinion, which, 
sooner or later, will admit it into reality. 

Hence the usefulness of arguments and researches 
in the realm of the possible and even of the false: 
they may end in conquests for the human mind. 

Truth is the morality of ideas. The man of whom 
the majority approves is moral, the idea of which 
man approves is true. 

But there are worthless beings, at all stages of 
existence: they remain, accepted and despised. 

The Metaphysician: In the course of its own 
development a being is ever faced by the Inactual 
it is perpetually rejecting. It feels, all round its 

[7] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

narrow circle, the disquieting presence of all it has 
not expressed, has not drawn into consciousness. It 
cannot therefore shape itself purely logically, as its 
need of simplicity and clearness would have it do. 

But when a being tries to figure the universe out- 
side itself its need of logic and clearness is free; it 
pictures other beings with fast and precise lines. 

Hence arises the fundamental error, spring of all 
others, which is to mistake the form for the whole, 
the expression for the being. 

The Poet: This is the problem of the completion 
of the Actual. The non-expressed, ever present, in- 
fluences the expressed. 

Will a state of equilibrium be reached? 

Will the Actual master the Inactual? 

The Psychologist: The first condition of 
thought is to be incomplete. Therefore, as thought 
becomes more and more precise, it leaves outside 
itself more and more of the Inactual. 

Thinking develops problems, and does not solve 
them. 

A being trying to understand itself develops into 
a subject and an object: it demands in itself an 
observer that is watching it. The very conception 
of this second person, this observer, makes an object 
of it, which necessitates a third witness in the mind. 
The subject, trying to grasp its own existence, mul- 
tiplies, and escapes its own grasp. 

The Metaphysician: Every existence is infinite: 
therefore, all law is impossible. 

[8] 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 

The Actual intensifies the Inactual by casting out 
of itself unexpressed possibilities, which their very 
rejection exasperates. 

The Inactual, ever greater and ever more intense, 
is an infinite source of actuality, as it is ever tending 
towards expression. The non-expressed seeks to ex- 
press itself; but all expression adds to the mass of the 
non-expressed all it rejects, and thus increases it. 

In this way the Actual and the Inactual grow to- 
gether, perpetually the one out of the other. 

The Metaphysician (again) : And thus all per- 
fection is impossible. Thus, also, there is absolute 
identity between perfect being and non-being. The 
idea of omnipotence is self-contradictory. 

One can only act upon what offers resistance. 

To the Omnipotent, nothing can offer resist- 
ance, he can act upon nothing. Perfect thought 
understands itself entirely; all diversity in it is 
absorbed into unique and perfectly monotonous 
light. 

Perfect being has nothing to think of: there is no 
problem left for it: it therefore no longer thinks. 
Nor does it desire any longer, having nothing left to 
desire. Why should perfection , change? Why 
should the infinite become finite? That which is 
satisfied ceases from being, that which comes into 
perfection falls into nothingness. Absolute existence 
annihilates itself. 

The Poet: A progress towards perfection is a 
progress towards annihilation. 

[9] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

The Psychologist: The aim of all desire is to 
become conscious of itself, with a consciousness as 
clear and as intense as possible. 

In order to know itself, all desire has to concentrate 
itself: it can intensify its own consciousness only on 
one point at a time. 

In order to know itself, desire has to limit itself: 
to cast out of itself a number of its possibilities — 
and any rejected possibility is an open spring of new 
existences. 

Thus desire, expressing itself, subdivides itself. 
All being divides itself in its expression. 

The Metaphysician: This, then, is the way in 
which desire divides itself into beings : 

The impossibility for Total Being to conceive itself 
as a whole is the spring of separate existences, for, 
if it could so conceive itself, being would be one only. 
But its first expression being necessarily incomplete, 
in its unexpressed parts other beings form themselves, 
separate from the first. 

Each of those first existences is a Universe. 

In each Universe, thus created, numerous beings 
in their turn are formed, each crystallizing one tend- 
ency of the parent being, each rejecting a new 
Inactual. 

Each of those beings in its turn is subdivided in 
an infinite process. Thus being is divided and sub- 
divided, becoming more and more diverse, intense 
and limited. Thus into a world come men, and into 
a man come ideas. 

[10] 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 
FEELING— CONCENTRATION— CREATION 

The Metaphysician: Pain springs from inten- 
sity. It is the feeling of the separation of the Actual 
from the Inactual, when desire tears and casts out of 
itself part of its own being in order to limit and con- 
centrate itself. 

All creation produces suffering, since all creation 
is limitation and concentration. 

The Psychologist: Hence in man a fear of all 
intensity, of all concentration, of all progress : a fear 
of love in young hearts, a fear of work in all men. 

But joy in love and in work runs parallel to pain 
and is greater, since it is made up of the intimate 
sense of the normal development of life, and also of 
asceticism, of the pleasure there is in a pain accepted 
and conquered. 

The Metaphysician: Pleasure is the self-con- 
sciousness of desire, which is the aim of life in all its 
expressions, the essence of being. 

The Psychologist: There is in love: for woman 
a humiliation in loving, with the pride of being loved; 
for man a humiliation in being loved, with the pride 
of loving. 

To this might be compared the humiliation there 
is in work for man, which still continues to exist, when 
mastered, in the pride of great workers. 

A contrast: man is humiliated in being an object 
of love; woman is proud of being an object of work — 
of inspiring work, 

[II] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

The Metaphysician: Humiliation is the con- 
sciousness of limitation in face of the world: the 
feeling that we are part of a whole, and that the whole 
— the world — in its lower stage of being, wider and 
less intense than we are, despises the point, narrower 
and more intense, which we are making. 

Hence the humiliation of the specialist, the con- 
tempt the world feels for him. 

Humiliation is the external sense of limitation; as 
suffering is the internal sense of it. 

In the pride of love and work is the feeling that we 
lead, that we carry forward the world — with defiance 
of it, and the asceticism of conquered shame. 

The Psychologist: Love is for man a possibility 
of enlarging his being: hence his pride in loving. 
For woman it is a limitation : hence her shame in it. 

The Metaphysician: With her social sense wo- 
man feels shame bitterly — but her social sense is not 
limited to society. Woman is ashamed of her love 
before the universe, before things and the general 
being, rather than before men. She is often proud 
of it before men, but in her inner heart she is humil- 
iated. Hence her need to hide love. 

The Poet: Man is ashamed of inspiring love, 
while woman is proud of inspiring work; this shows 
that the sense of universal communion is more devel- 
oped in her. She is proud of being an instrument of 
this communion: man is humiliated. 

The Psychologist: There is a part of error in 
pity, as our pleasure in the presence of pain proves. 

[12] 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 

Pity is a degradation for the pitied one. Pity 
shows we are not at one with the march of the 
universe. 

Woman has the feeling of universal communion, 
hence her joy in suffering; in her own, in others: the 
pitilessness of woman. 

The Metaphysician: Pity is a personal pain 
felt by the witness of pain; the concentration pain- 
fully carried out in one being is being carried out 
in the whole universe: the whole universe suffers 
when one being suffers. 

Pity is a disguise the universe puts upon its own 
pain in the presence of a suffering being. 

Hence the contempt of the sufferer for those who 
pity him. In reality, they suffer for and in them- 
selves, and are pretending they suffer for him. But 
he suffers more. This explains the irritation there 
is in being pitied. 

There is in suffering the same humiliation as in 
love and in work; from which springs the need of 
secrecy in suffering. 

The Psychologist: Jealousy and purity are 
forms of the instinct of concentration in love: the 
sense that its development must take place in one 
direction exclusive of all others. 

Hence the need of secrecy for love: it avoids all 
outside participation for a spectator is a participant. 

There is a hypocrisy in love which consists in loving 
in order to know. Woman therefore mistrusts in- 
tellect. 

[13] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

The Poet : The instinct of concentration is shown 
in the ferocious rivalries between men who work on 
the same lines. Each wants to be the one channel of 
evolution. 

The Metaphysician: Love is the consciousness 
that a creation is possible by union, either physical 
or intellectual. 

Feeling springs from creation; also from the cre- 
ation of feeling. 

Thus, among many other feelings, the consciousness 
of possible creation produces love, which, for instance, 
produces the feeling of making the loved one happy; 
which, for instance, produces pride — or, occasionally, 
hatred. 

And so on, ad infinitum. Therefore, feeling is 
inexhaustible. 

Therefore, all being is infinite in its desires; and 
any individual is infinite. 

The Psychologist: In pity there is, besides, a 
pleasure in the presence of suffering. And in love, 
there is envy of the happiness of the loved one. The 
ascetic pleasure of conquering that envy does much 
to deepen love. 

There is also in love a hatred produced by the lim- 
itations, the suffering, which the loved one — and crea- 
tion — bring about. 

Hence the easy transformation of love into hatred. 

But that hatred normally deepens love, makes it 
more serious; feelings which have to struggle against 
others strike deeper roots. 

[14] 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 

The instinct of concentration, the need for individ- 
ualization, brings about our desire that none should 
have what we have: jealousy. 

Hence, for lovers, the shame there is in recognising 
in others their own feeling, especially in inferior be- 
ings: animals, despised people. Hence the need that 
none even of our own expressions should be a repeti- 
tion, which is a vulgarisation. 

The Metaphysician: Avarice is the love of an 
expression for its own sake, without reference to its 
aim : the triumph of the absorbing power of the Ac- 
tual. For instance, art for art's sake, philology, 
science: the acceptance of language as a reality. 

The Psychologist: Morality is the sense that 
the concentration of the Actual is necessarily a lim- 
itation. 

It consists in renouncing numerous possibilities of 
action, and directing life along one exclusive line. 
Civilized man, to become moral, has to give up many 
activities which are natural to the savage. 

The question what way is chosen, can be answered 
in different manners, according to historical circum- 
stances. Ultimately, man may come to choose the 
way that helps the universe. 

But meanwhile there are several parallel morali- 
ties; as long as there is deliberate and consistent 
choice of one exclusive line of action, there is mor- 
ality. 

There is identity between morality and jealousy — 
the need of concentration. 

[15] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

There is identity between the moral conscience and 
consciousness : the first necessity for both is to choose 
between different possibilities; to reject some; to con- 
centrate on the selected ones. 

There is identity between morality and creation, 
either physical or intellectual. 

The first law of being is the law of concentration. 

THE INDIVIDUAL 

The Poet: At our birth and at each decision we 
take in life, we reject a great number of possibilities, 
which, however, remain in our Inactual. In response 
to the appeal of certain circumstances or people, some 
of the possibilities usually under the control of our 
habitual personality assert themselves in us. We 
then assume a different personality. 

But when our usual personality returns, we find 
ourselves in a false position: we have to keep the 
promises, and bear the responsibility of the acts, of 
the usurping personality. 

Hence the unintentional but natural occurrence of 
lies and unfaithfulness. Hence the fundamental un- 
reliability of most men, who are not sufficiently mas- 
ters of their own characters to keep down intruding 
personalities. 

The Metaphysician: The possibilities thus re- 
jected by each are infinite for each. They interpene- 
trate one another, and thus constitute an external 
common unconscious. 

[16] 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 



The Inactual belongs to no one individual. 

There is no boundary between the self and the not- 
self. 

Our sense of an outside world is the feeling that 
while some of our possibilities are realised, some are 
not. 

The Psychologist: There is a law of contraries, 
and of their attraction for each other. A being has 
some fundamental tendency. As he gains knowl- 
edge of himself, that tendency becomes to him com- 
monplace, exhausted, and a hindrance to his other 
desires. 

In consequence the highest and most conscious part 
of him takes their side, in as far as it can (although 
the fundamental tendency is still preserved). 

Thus one being is compact of contraries. A tend- 
ency is a limitation from which a being often needs 
to escape; the opposite extreme is the most use- 
ful quality to that being; and he possesses himself 
of it. 

The Metaphysician: The difference between one 
individual and another lies in the extent to which 
each consents to limit himself — to suffer — in order to 
actualise and intensify himself; the measure in which 
he consents to work. 

The more a being limits himself, the more intense 
it becomes, the more of the Inactual it casts out; the 
more it suffers. 

The Metaphysician (again): Each being, each 
desire, develops on its own plane; it cannot pass up 

[17] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

to another plane of being: that would be to cease 
from being itself. 

But in its own plane, in its inexhaustible capacity 
for subdivision, each being has infinite development 
open to it: the only infinite it desires. It neither 
wants nor is it able to change itself; it only desires 
to express itself more and more, such as it is. 

The Poet: Thus, after death, vile beings will 
continue to express their vile desires subdivided into 
vile ideas. 

The Psychologist on Old Age: A desire, the 
desire of physical pleasure, having transformed itself 
into diverse other desires and into ideas, falls and 
ceases. It was the principal desire behind the 
body. 

Its co-desires continue, and keep up the common 
expression — the body. But the disappearance of 
their chief creates numerous obstacles to their ex- 
istence. In the ensuing struggle, each one, more or 
less rapidly, reaches its own perfection. One by one, 
they fall, they sleep. They give up that mode of 
expression, the body, which exhausts them, perfects 
them, kills them. 

The Poet: They sleep, to wake up again, and 
then, their chief, sexual desire, being no longer pres- 
ent, having been finally subdivided, they build for 
themselves a new vehicle of expression, easier, sup- 
pler, more pliable to their wants, than the body. 

The Psychologist: Thus a being dies in old age, 
gradually. Sexual desire is the principal desire in 

[18] 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 

the body: life on earth is sexual life. When it disap- 
pears, in old age, the expression must change: death 
is coming. 

The Poet: Childhood is the gradual appearance 
of the desires of a being: the world refuses to be 
hustled: it only consents to take a new being into 
account little by little. The introduction of a being 
is a struggle, gradual and regular. 

The Psychologist: There are in us numerous 
secondary desires which need to be expressed. If 
they are not, they fill us with their rebelliousness. 

From this arises the necessity for regular occupa- 
tions and physical labor, for those secondary desires 
are chiefly expressed in the actions of the body. 
Their non-satisfaction causes illness. 

Being hardly conscious, they are easily forgotten, 
with evil results. They allow us to work at our 
higher expressions only when they are appeased. 
And with their collaboration, higher desires can be 
better expressed. 

The Poet: So in society must the masses, the sum 
total of the innumerable secondary desires of man- 
kind, be occupied and satisfied. 

The Psychologist: Many of our deeper feelings 
hardly become conscious. They become apparent in 
our actions. Judged by the relation between our 
conscious feelings and our actions, we should be found 
senseless. 

The Poet: Sometimes, in moments of great calm, 
before sleep, in dreams, we perceive the summits of 

[19] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

those deeper feelings, like islands appearing in some 
universal low tide. 

The Metaphysician: As our ideas, subdivided 
from us after our death, will no longer be conscious 
of us, so we no longer know those cosmic feelings 
which carry us and make us act. 

They are parts of immense beings, anterior to us, 
of whom we are points. 

The Psychologist: Even our willed actions cor- 
respond to deeper feelings than those which seem to 
inspire them. Our non-willed actions must corre- 
spond to deeper feelings still, which perhaps constitute 
destiny. 

The Metaphysician: Which express themselves 
through us to become conscious. 

That is the reason, though not the aim of our life. 

The Metaphysician (again) : The unconscious is 
the presence in individuals of the universal desires. 
It does not concern men, but universes. It is an 
error to look to the unconscious part of a man for his 
true personality. The unconscious is not personal: 
it is vague; it is not so powerful as the conscious. 
When it is drawn into light, nothing very high or 
very desirable is obtained. Its power comes from its 
immense mass. 

It is not man's aim to draw into light the great 
vague desires of the universes upon which we live, 
but only the parts of those desires we have chosen as 
our own, and concentrated upon. To cultivate the 
unconscious is going backwards. It is the cosmolog- 

[20] 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 

ical heresy, which consists in trying to realise the 
world's desires, not ours; in giving ourselves up to 
become the universe. 

Universal desires have reached in their sphere — 
an unconscious one for us — the intensity they are 
capable of. We force and warp them when we try to 
draw them higher, to make them into the essential 
parts of our beings of which they are indeed the 
largest and least important parts; the centre of our 
life is not in them. 

Our languages are not made for them, and do them 
wrong. 

The work of man is on the next higher stage: he 
has only to enjoy world desire, not to express it. 

THE UNIVERSE, MEN AND IDEAS 

The Metaphysician: There are two forms of 
creation known to man: love — the creation of men 
and of feelings, the passing from universal masses to 
mankind; intelligence— the creation of thoughts, the 
passing from man to ideas. 

In woman is accomplished the passing from the 
universe to mankind; hence woman is nearer to the 
universe than man and her feeling of universal 
communion is greater than man's. 

What we call conception is the union of ideas (in 
possibility) given by man, with the universal mass, 
prepared by woman; the rousing, by man's appeal, 
of the latent possibility of ideas in the universal 

[21] 



I 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

matter in woman; the realisation of those possibilities 
in woman. 

The masculine element is the Actual. 

The feminine element is the Inactual. 

The Psychologist: The aim of union in love is 
the realisation of the life of the participants : joy, and 
not creation of a new being. 

The Metaphysician: Any concentration of the 
Actual in joy is an incitement to the Inactual to ac- 
complish a similar concentration. 

Conception comes from pleasure; in the presence 
of pleasure the Inactual, by its own motion, rushes 
into being. 

The Poet: But birth, which is a separation from 
the universal mass, and a casting off of the Inactual, 
takes place in pain. 

The Psychologist: The feminine element is as 
necessary for the creation of ideas as it is for the crea- 
tion of physical life. The mechanism of creation is 
the same in both cases; the appeal of an intense 
Actual to the vague possibilities of the Inactual, 
which, responding, crystallise into an expression. 

Thus in each individual the two elements, mascu- 
line and feminine, are found. 

Great intellectual creators have m.ore of woman in 
them than other men; they can, alone, create ideas, 
whereas in ordinary men or women there is not enough 
of the other element to make them actively, com- 
pletely creative: they need the contact of the other 
sex to create ideas; for love is normally necessary 

[22] 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 

even to the creation of ideas. The selfishness of men 
of genius has much of love in it ; they are in love with 
the feminine part of themselves. 

The Metaphysician: The proper aim of human 
existence is the resolution of desires into ideas. 

The Poet: Perhaps the aim of animal and in- 
ferior life is the resolution of the universe into human 
desires. 

The Poet (again) : The dispositions in woman 
that make her apt to bear children are not the con- 
sequences of her function, but the causes of it. 

The creation of the sexes is explained by the law 
of contraries. The first effort of concentration of 
the general being produces the Actual, the masculine 
element, precise and creative. But man, by himself 
and in himself, is too precise; he needs his opposite 
to be alive. The general Inactual is too vague to 
answer his too precise appeal. 

Hence man's need of, man's appeal for, a limited 
Inactual, an Inactual within his reach, which he can 
fecundate. The response to that appeal is woman. 

The Psychologist: Desire, when it develops, 
multiplying itself and becoming more precise through 
language, transforms itself into ideas. Feeling be- 
comes intelligence. Sentiments become ideas. 

The intellect, in its workings, starts from a very 
vague general idea, which is really nothing but a feel- 
ing. This feeling is developed by language. To ex- 
press it, we choose its principal points. Each of 
those points is divided and subdivided into more 

[23] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

precise parts, until the primitive feeling has been re- 
solved into ideas. 

A being's degree of intelligence depends upon the 
precision and certainty with which that being chooses, 
to express them, the essential points of its feeling. 

An argument is false when it has not expressed 
those essential points. Then the feeling at its base 
remains unsatisfied. 

The difference in quality between one idea and an- 
other is in their more or less complete and accurate 
rejection of their Inactual. 

Thus intelligence is a quality of the will in desire. 

The Psychologist (again): For most people 
there is no conflict between desire and reason. Such 
a conflict is abnormal, and a disease. 

Essential desires in a man are taken for granted 
by him. His intellect is at work to satisfy them. 
His ideas are simply a development of his desires. 

His intellect is not even normally busy in justify- 
ing his desires, which need no justification, even if 
they are evil. 

Conflict, when it comes, is between the social law 
and the individual desire. It is not his own reason 
that the criminal goes against, but generally the rea- 
son of the group he belongs to: collective intelligence. 

The Metaphysician: What we call abstract 
ideas are only names given to groups, nations of ideas, 
each idea in which is different and individual. An 
idea can exist in one man only. Other men may have 
similar ideas, related or allied to that one, but an 

[24] 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 

idea is essentially a division of a certain man's de- 
sire, within him. 

When it is expressed, it may call up in other men 
similar ideas, and found a sort of nation of ideas in 
its likeness. Then we say that the idea is shared by 
other men; really it is multiplied in them. 

Therefore, strictly speaking, each idea is an indi- 
vidual; it lives in one man, and cannot live else- 
where, and no absolutely identical idea can exist 
anywhere. An idea is, in a man, a point of an im- 
memorial desire common to many men, which is sub- 
divided so as to reach consciousness in each of those 
men. Our language names that idea as though it 
were one in all its individual appearances. 

But really each man who accepts and understands 
a general idea is only realising in his desire an in- 
dividual idea related to all the ideas in other men 
which bear the same name. The abstract expression 
of an idea in our language is the attempt to give a 
name to one of those nations of ideas. 

The Poet: General ideas, thus named, hover 
over the world in art. He who wishes to, receives 
them, lets his Inactual be fecundated by them, and 
conceives in himself real and individual ideas, in 
their likeness. 

The pleasure of the creative artist is thus the mas- 
culine joy: the appeal that draws towards existence 
all vague possibilities, the joy of creating. 

The pleasure we take in art is the feminine pleas- 
ure: the joy of being created. 

[25] 



COSMOLOGY 
THE LANGUAGE OF MATTER 

The Metaphysician: Matter is a language. We 
use it to express larger and less subtle desires than are 
expressed in human languages; and we have it in 
common with many other beings. 

A whole category of our desires can be expressed 
properly only through it. 

Like human language, matter has its faults, its 
impossibilities, its errors. Its laws make the expres- 
sion of many of our desires impossible. We can only 
alter it very slowly and with great difficulty, be- 
cause the collaboration of the beings who use it 
stretches much too far for our control. Hence it is 
necessary for us to create our own languages, which 
are less universal, less real, but more supple, more 
delicate, and more individual. 

The Poet: Just as the sounds of human language 
are vibrations, so matter is made up only of vibra- 
tions. 

The Psychologist: To act is to express oneself 
in the language of matter, just as to speak is to ex- 
press oneself in human language. 

Man and most beings express themselves chiefly 
[26] 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 

in this material language: hence its reality and im- 
portance. 

The Metaphysician: All beings collaborate, by 
their conduct, in the establishment of the conventions 
that rule over the language of matter; and they re- 
fuse to admit into that language, to understand, to 
take into account, all expressions that break these 
conventions. 

The Poet: Science is the grammar of the ma- 
terial language. But scientists study only the forms 
of it, that enable us to use it, not the meanings be- 
hind. Just as the laws of our language do not en- 
tirely apply to thought, so the laws of matter do not 
entirely apply to being. In reality, those laws of 
matter have no absolute value: they are only con- 
ventions. 

The Psychologist: Activity and thought are 
equally expressions of will or desire, only in different 
languages. Just as we have the power to do or not to 
do some action (which is an expression in the lan- 
guage of matter) irrespective of its righteousness or 
timeliness, so we have the power to believe or not 
to believe in some thought irrespective of its truth. 

The Poet: The work of all beings is the building 
of the languages which express being, by which and 
through which being realises itself: the construction 
of the world. 

The Metaphysician: The language of matter is 
learnt from our fellow-beings like our own lan- 
guages. 

[27] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

Birth is the adoption of this common language, 
which the world gradually teaches us. The child 
cannot yet use it well, and most of the universe does 
not exist for him. Each being naturally copies the 
language of other beings, in order to be understood 
and taken into account by them, but he brings into it 
his own qualities. 

Thus is formed the material Convention which 
everyone must adopt who wants to be a member of 
an organised world, who desires to be helped by his 
brothers in expressing himself: seeing that no one 
could have time or strength enough in his life to 
build an independent universe. 

The Poet: Matter, being a creation of the Con- 
vention, is perpetually disintegrating. Each being is 
in his body a prey to a perpetual disease, and must 
be perpetually rebuilding his body. 

The Convention fails us when we disobey its rules. 
When we offend against some "law of nature,*' the 
pact of the Convention suddenly breaks down in our 
body. Our body fails us, in accident, disease, or 
death, when we try to do something, to express some 
desire not admitted by the Convention. 

The rules of the Convention are logical and finite. 
Being, which is infinite, cannot limit its activity. 

In its growth, fatally, sooner or later, it breaks 
the laws of its body. Hence the inevitability of 
death. 

The laws of matter are around us as a perpetual 
trap; we break them, often unknowingly, in very 

[28] 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 

simple expressions of our being, easily avoidable had 
we known. That is accident. 



EPISTEMOLOGY 

The Metaphysician: Any modification of the 
Inactual involved in the development of any indi- 
vidual, changes, for all others, the sum of their pos- 
sibilities. 

For the Inactual is common to all. What is not 
expressed belongs no more to one individual than to 
another. 

The Poet: The unconscious belongs to all. It 
is like a dark sea upon which lighted ships sail, and 
which submits to no change except that imposed by 
each, as it passes. 

The Metaphysician: But each time a being 
wants to draw its desire out to the Inactual, it meets 
with the resistance — or the collaboration — of all that 
is already expressed. 

And so beings perceive each other's actions. 

The Poet: In the same way, at night, in a fog, a 
ship crossing the wake of another can, by the motions 
of the sea, estimate the power, the speed, the distance 
and the direction of the unknown passer-by. 

The Metaphysician: Our senses are the pow- 
ers that translate these impressions into the language 
of matter. 

The Psychologist: On Our Knowledge of 
Others: 

[29] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

Sources : our senses translate and register the modi- 
fications of our immediate Inactual. 

Interpretation: our mind builds, for the explana- 
tion of those facts, several systems of possibilities. 

Our decision: we choose one of those systems (here 
come in sureness of intuition, precision of intellect, 
habits of thought, chance). 

Our test of the adopted hypothesis: we see how 
things happen in us and whether the cause we have 
singled out, working in us, would produce the effect 
to be accounted for. Seeing that our mind is in har- 
mony and identity with the universe, this must be 
our test of our judgments of the universe. Moreover, 
no other test is possible, as, directly, we know only 
ourselves. And as we are part of the universe, its 
laws work in us and are discoverable in us. No one 
can judge except of what he finds in himself. The 
better anyone knows himself, the more outside things 
he can know. 

The Metaphysician: A being can find in him- 
self, more or less developed, all that there is in the 
world. 

Other beings are only unknown parts of ourselves. 

The Poet: It is necessary, for our verification of 
knowledge, that we should know the internal work- 
ings, the ''how things happen," in another being; in 
that being in whom are developed desires comple- 
mentary to ours, and with whom creation is possible 
for us. 

Love is therefore necessary for the intellect. 
[30] 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 

The Psychologist: The essential error is to al- 
low our sentimental reaction to an external shock to 
be the source of our beliefs; to mistake impressions 
(of ourselves) and expressions (of ourselves or oth- 
ers) for realities. This error is fatal and natural, 
since the source of our knowledge is the variation of 
our desire when the Inactual varies. Our senses ren- 
der us the immense service of representing reality as 
external and different from us, thus partly saving us 
from our personal impressions. But then we mistake 
that expression for a reality. 

The Poet: On Chronological Epistemology: 
The Evolution of the Senses: Millions of cen- 
turies of evolution, through the vegetable and animal 
kingdoms, must have been necessary to build the 
powers of the senses. Perhaps that is the function 
of those two kingdoms on the earth. 

The individual had to learn, in the course of im- 
mense periods: (1) that his feelings are not the only 
things that exist; (2) that an external world exists, 
which he infers solely from his sensations; (3) that 
that world is independent, and represents other wills 
than his own; (4) to represent that world to himself, 
by organising his sensations into consonant matter 
(which does not properly exist in low organisms) ; 
(5) to learn from others the invariable laws of mat- 
ter constituted by common accord in the course of 
mineral, vegetable, and animal evolution. Plants ex- 
ist only for themselves; they are the only solipsists. 
In the upward course of animality, the individual 

[31] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

perceives the existence of others, and gets a more 
and more precise idea of them. 

Mistakes were often made and dearly paid for. 
To have an illusion about the outside world and to 
trust to one's feelings in regard to it was often to 
incur death in the lower stages of life. That neces- 
sitated and created a belief in and certainty about 
the existence of an external world which was immut- 
able and regular. Thus in the course of evolution, 
the individual necessarily lost the feeling that his 
senses created the outside world, and accustomed 
himself to regard them as mere registers. In this 
way, internal feeling, the only thing at first, the chief 
thing afterwards, tended to become a secondary thing 
at last; the individual learnt to consider that the vari- 
ations of his internal feelings were important only 
as symptoms of outside changes. Thus was the 
language of matter gradually built up : an organisa- 
tion into fixed laws of the individual's sensations de- 
rived from external phenomena. What is important 
to a being is not that he is the creator of that or- 
ganisation, but that the organisation should be effi- 
cient; one that he can act upon without danger. It 
is also important that it should function as easily, as 
automatically, as rapidly, and as unconsciously as 
possible: for those modes will be advantageous to 
him. He needs his consciousness for the intricate 
problem, how to act, once he has truly represented 
the outside world. Consequently all consciousness of 
the working of the senses tends to disappear in the 

[32] 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 

course of evolution: for every belief (or remem- 
brance) that we can build the world as we like brings 
swift retribution and suffering. 

The Psychologist: Reason is an attempt to ad- 
just some perception to the rest of our culture. 
Hence its absurdities when the culture is insufficient, 
even when the first intuition is true. Many people 
have true opinions that have no right to them, for 
they justify them by absurd reasons. 

The Metaphysician: Matter is a language, but 
matter is a reality: it exists such that we can perceive 
it, in the being of others, which embraces the universe 
as a whole. It is an arrangement of primordial 
vibrations which are the elementary stuff of which 
all beings are made. 

The resistances we meet in our action upon the 
Inactual are vibrations; they are matter; they are 
the rhythm in which other beings express themselves. 

The Poet: On Fear as an Example of the 
Working of the Language of Matter: The phys- 
ical impression: trembling and heart-beating pre- 
cedes the panic. One thinks, I am going to be fright- 
ened. But the physical impression is not the cause 
of the moral one: it can be resisted (as Turenne re- 
sisted it) and need not be followed by terror. Some- 
times it happens when no physical cause can produce 
it: a man used to gun practice trembles when he 
first hears real guns in war. There takes place, 
therefore — and it is a general process for all per- 
ception — (1) a perception by the being, through 

[33] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

the Inactual, that something threatens him; (2) an 
immediate representation of it in his body: the being, 
to be able to judge of the fact, interprets it into his 
language, and it is only then that he becomes con- 
scious of it — when he has expressed it; so that what 
is seen first is the immediate fact; (3) a decision 
whether or not there is occasion to fear. Even when 
the decision is negative, the trembling sometimes con- 
tinues while the danger lasts. The trembling is the 
representation of the danger, not of the fear. But 
some are strong enough to stop it, since it has become 
unnecessary. 

The Psychologist: The actions of other beings 
towards us are determined by their opinion of us. 
They thus modify the Inactual. They give us a false 
personality: they make our action easier in one direc- 
tion: they call for that action of ours which is ap- 
propriate to the character they have imposed upon 
us, and draw us towards it; and all the forces of the 
convention drive us on. 

Then we act, not according to our desires, but in 
response to the opinions and the needs of others. 

Hence the place in our life of actions independent 
of our essential desires. Many people express very 
little their peculiar desires: they have neither the 
time nor the choice. Thus the world draws each of 
us into a profession. 

Few are strong enough to resist at all, and the 
strongest resist but little. 

The Poet: We may do what the appeal of others 
[34] 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 

makes us do and yet in the act express some of our 
own desires — in the way in which we do it. We can 
thus express our desire for order, for asceticism, for 
self-mastery, by cultivating the conscious desires that 
awaken in us when any action is involved. 

EVIL 

The Metaphysician: Pleasure and pain spring 
from all acts of creation, for an act of creation 
is a manifestation of the Actual, which gives joy, 
and a rejection of the Inactual, which causes 
suffering. 

In the Inactual, whose essence is the need to ex- 
press all it contains, subsists, becoming more exas- 
perated at each creation, that desire which no being 
will express : the desire to express suffering. 

That is the principle of Evil. 

The collective efforts of beings, who refuse to ex- 
press pain and mutually help one another in their ex- 
pressions, keep the Evil One at bay. 

But any being who breaks the Convention is no 
longer helped by his brothers, but is left to his own 
devices; and the Evil One pounces upon him and 
makes him his channel of expression. 

Thus any violation of the laws of the Convention 
brings about suffering — moral evil : the expression of 
pain by those who have not created it. 

The Psychologist: A noble spectator is impa- 
tient of suffering: his pride rebels at the thought that 

[35] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

another should suffer for him; but a sufferer suffers 
for all. 

Hence a kind of charity — the need to relieve; and 
a kind of irony — the need to humiliate the sufferer. 

And when the sufferer does not bear his pain well, 
there is then for the spectator the humiliation of 
having cast his burden upon a weak one; and irrita- 
tion, and disdain. 

The Metaphysician : An accident happens when, 
a rule of the Convention having been broken by us, 
others refuse to take our expression into account. 
We are then alone and unprotected: hence suffering, 
ever lying in wait in the Inactual, comes upon us: 
hence at times it is impossible for us to express our- 
selves at all: death. 

Hence, in the stricken one, the feeling that he has 
been betrayed, left by his brothers in a trap. 

Hence his resentment against all, and specially 
against those related to him, who ought, as he can- 
not help feeling, to have stood by him. 

The Poet: On a Science of Evil: There are 
evil ones who realise actively the desires of the Evil 
One: whose desire and joy it is to make men suffer. 
They are the channels through which evil flows into 
mankind. 

But in the end the coalition of men baffles them 
and repulses their effort. Then the suffering of which 
they were the channels accumulates in them until 
they are shattered by it. 

[36] 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 

They put themselves outside of the Convention. 
They make a pact with the Evil One. He gives 
them success and intelligence. But in the end, he 
takes possession of them. 

They have success, by instinct men feel their 
power and give way to them. 

They have intelligence: they know the ways of 
Evil, the ways of the distribution of suffering — things 
of which ordinary men refuse to be conscious. 

But they step out of the Convention which is built 
against the Evil One; so no one helps them. When 
the Convention at last unmasks them, they are power- 
less and the easiest of victims of the Evil One. 

There is a science of evil; the Evil One is the 
creator of it, but not, as he is made to boast, of the 
science of good. The evil ones know the ways of 
evil, but they are ignorant of the ways of good and 
of the Convention. All the evil ones ultimately 
ruin themselves through their lack of common 
sense. 

Common sense is the privilege of the good. 

The Psychologist: Sufferers get relief by becom- 
ing evil. They pass on to others the suffering in 
them; they become channels instead of reservoirs of 
suffering. 

The temptation of the sufferers: to become evil. 

The Psychologist (again): There is an evil one 
in every man: it is a more or less developed part in 
each of us. 

[37] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

Anger: the Evil One, the need to make someone 
suffer, gets possession of us. 

The Poet: On the Method of the Evil Ones, 
Which Is Mainly Unconscious: (1) They sense 
originality, which is a weakness, which causes the 
victim to advance beyond the protecting Conven- 
tion. (2) They love. The evil one loves; he has 
the same desires as other men, but they are less in 
him, and more quickly satisfied. He uses those 
weaker desires of his as instruments: by collabora- 
tion, appeal, love, he draws those who have it to 
affirm and express their originality. (3) Then the 
evil ones abandon their collaboration. 

Once his desire is satisfied, the evil one gives up 
the collaboration. That is the sin of Judas. It is a 
temptation to all, but good men resist it, for they 
have the feeling that the expression of others must be 
helped — the sense of the Convention. 

The evil ones abandon the work when incomplete; 
work yet incomplete, outside the Convention, at- 
tracts the Evil One. This is because it is not yet 
realised, and has no power of resistance. 

The Psychologist: The policy of the evil ones is 
as follows: In love, it is seduction; in work, it is 
betrayal. 

The evil one has a double joy : first, he realises his 
own desire, afterwards, his need to cause suffering. 

Strife between two evil ones is frequent; the high- 
est joy of an evil one is to see another crushed, for in 
that there is involved the greatest suffering. 

[38] 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 

The good faith of the evil ones is often real, at 
least at the beginning. They satisfy their own de- 
sires; but they have little of the intelligence of the 
Convention, and so are ignorant of the desires of oth- 
ers. At the first, they love their victim. But they 
are easily offended by him, and this is natural. 

It is easy to offend the evil ones for they call to 
evil in us. 

The Poet: There is a fascination in the evil ones: 
they give us joys that others cannot give. Often, too, 
their victims love them. 

Evil ones attach themselves especially to men of 
genius. 

They often begin by helping them; and the man 
of genius is often the first to offend. 

It is, indeed, a temptation for all who come near 
a genius to betray him, for all are weak in comparison 
with him. He causes them to suffer; he asks their 
help when their desires are exhausted. So all are 
tempted to leave him and to be avenged upon him. 

Often heroism is needed not to betray a man of 
genius. Hence, in men of genius a mistrust of all 
whom they love and who love them: the mania of 
persecution. 

The Metaphysician: Morality is essentially as- 
ceticism, the acceptance of suffering, wilful self- 
limitation, calm in the sacrifice of inferior desires. 
Asceticism gives patience and strength, enables us to 
resist the Evil One. That makes us invulnerable to 
the world, for all that the world can do is to deliver 

[39] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

us to the Evil One. It enables us also to help others 
who suffer; to take upon ourselves their struggle 
against the Evil One: or to aid them in work which 
is outside the Convention. 

The Poet: On Laughter Directed Against one 
who Breaks the Rules: The sense of the ridicu- 
lous is essentially the sense that the Convention is 
broken, and that someone is going to suffer. It is 
as if we felt that there is a certain quantity of suffer- 
ing to be dealt out, and that any which is distributed 
to others is spared us. 

This old barbarous laughter is the joy in the suf- 
fering of those who break the rules : a form of the joy 
in suffering. 

Civilized laughter will be used as a warning to the 
men who leave the Convention to make them aware 
of their blunder in time, that so they may avoid the 
suffering. 

THE THREE CONVENTIONS:— THE MATERIAL 

CONVENTION; THE MORAL CONVENTION; 

THE METAPHYSICAL CONVENTION 

The Metaphysician: Matter was constituted as 
a language by the First Convention, the Convention 
of the Universes, which all help us in its expression. 

Morality was established as a mode of expression 
by the Convention of men. 

The next task is the creation of the Convention of 
ideas: the foundation of a Metaphysical Convention. 

[40] 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 

As yet there are only individual minds. There is 
no metaphysical world (no body of ideas true for all 
minds) as there is, more or less, a body of moral laws 
true for all men, and a body of material laws true for 
all things. 

There must be established and made conscious be- 
tween minds a relationship upon which they can de- 
pend. 

The Convention has created physical laws, moral 
laws, but not yet metaphysical laws. 

Therefore, most men have no metaphysical ideas; 
just as they would have no moral ideas and no phys- 
ical world had they to create them. 

The Poet: The task of philosophers is to find out 
desirable metaphysical laws, as they formerly dis- 
covered suitable moral ones, and as, in the beginning, 
beings found and established material laws. When 
that is accomplished, little by little metaphysical 
laws will be accepted by all. 

The Psychologist: The task of the Metaphys- 
ical Convention will be: 

To organize the distribution of suffering and the 
struggle against evil; 

To help all creative minds; 

To awaken and develop in each being its meta- 
physical desires; 

To prepare the language of ideas, chiefly through 
the Arts. 

The failures and imperfections of the two exist- 
ing Conventions, material and moral, arise from the 

[41] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

fact that they are not upheld and enlightened by a 
Metaphysical Convention. 

The three are only three different degrees of con- 
sciousness of the same facts. 

The Metaphysician: When the Moral Conven- 
tion was established man was not wise enough to see 
the reason for it; he established it experimentally in 
order to preserve his existence. 

And yet morality has been well founded, and be- 
ing well founded it provides a rough criterion of 
metaphysical creation. 

Its aims are to express life, to augment joy, to cre- 
ate more life (to do good to others), to struggle 
against evil (to avoid giving pain to others). 

Metaphysics will have to find out the means to 
those aims; to discover first and to understand the 
principles upon which the Conventions have been 
based; and, if necessary, to alter them; by superior 
authority. 

The Poet: The intuitions of the sacred books, 
which are essentially the consciousness of the Moral 
Convention in the freshness of its foundation, have 
so far been the basis of all philosophy. Philosophers 
have only tried to understand and to organize the 
world, the Convention, half revealed in them. 

The Metaphysician: Therefore, there has been 
so far no metaphysics, because of the two great Con- 
ventional errors: 

The error of the Material Convention — the reality 
[42] 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 

of matter as separate from desire, the ultimate value 
of material law; 

The error of the Moral Convention — the reality 
of the Absolute, the ultimate value of the moral law. 

Those two errors are fundamentally one- — a belief 
in the reality of the Absolute. 

Each was necessary for the establishment of the 
corresponding Convention. In its Convention each 
was a truth. Without them the preliminary Conven- 
tions could not have been founded, and being could 
not have progressed to metaphysical consciousness. 

Philosophy, in so far as it has only as yet realised 
the two old orders, cannot arrive at metaphysics; 
it can only reveal the ultimate absurdity of both, 
their intimate self-contradiction, and thus can do no 
positive work. In doing this, it is merely preparing 
the advent of metaphysics. 

The Poet: The Absolute in the Moral Conven- 
tion was called God. It was necessary to the exist- 
ence of morality; man was not conscious yet of his 
power to create his destiny, and therefore needed the 
belief that it was created by the Absolute Good. 

The Psychologist: To master physical desires 
the Moral Convention had to separate matter and 
spirit. It made of matter the enemy; and thus gave 
it an independent reality. Thus the Moral Conven- 
tion consolidated the error of the Material Conven- 
tion. 

The Poet : The philosophers have only been com- 
[43] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

mentators on the sacred books. They write like com- 
mentators; they have no style. 

The Psychologist: The need for a Metaphysical 
Convention is exemplified most clearly in the lack of 
all control over creative individual power. Man cre- 
ates naturally a number of ideas, images and forms 
without limit. He is obliged to choose some, which 
he tries to make true. He expresses these in collabo- 
ration with his brothers : past, present, future, human 
and non-human (things and ideas). 

Inevitably, many are rejected and remain true only 
for individuals. 

Thus, everywhere in art and life are found a great 
number of ideas, images and forms, unknown to or 
rejected by the masses. Some gather together a few 
adherents. These stand in a sort of gradation from 
truth to error, according to the will power and 
collaborative strength of their adherents. 

They really exist for some, sometimes for one 
only, and it seems to him then that they are simply 
not seen by others. 



[44] 



PSYCHOLOGY 
THE SELF 

The Metaphysician: Responsibility is the first 
condition of being; existence in a universe means the 
power to modify it. That power can exist only for 
a being who is able to bear the consequences of 
those modifications, who has the strength to main- 
tain them, who can bear responsibilities. 

A person, once created, is imperishable: its re- 
sponsibility keeps it in existence. When it appeared 
all existing beings took a decision in relation to it, 
accepting or rejecting it in some measure, and thus 
all their ultimate developments, all the posterior 
development of the universe is based on the existence 
of that person; on the fact that at any moment it 
is there to maintain (and bear the consequences of) 
its actions. 

The Psychologist: That does not imply the 
continuance of the person in an unchanged state. 

The Metaphysician : If any one being could dis- 
appear altogether the equilibrium of the universe 
would be upset. The whole work of the universe 
from the birth of that being onwards would crumble 
down. 

The Poet: The world would have perpetually to 
[45] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

begin all over again and thus would vaguely move 
on through eternity, in total chaos, remaining im- 
personal and unconscious, finding no way out. 

The Metaphysician: Desire can be conscious 
only of itself. If our desires were not realised in our 
actions, if we were submitted to an external de- 
terminism, our desires would not be aware of our 
actions, nor should we — unless that determinism 
should help or hinder some free expression of our 
desires. 

Desire which could not express itself would not 
know itself, nor, therefore, other desires, which it 
knows by their interference with its expression. 

Hence consciousness implies liberty. 

Every conscious being is free. 

Every being is infinite. 

Being free and infinite, every conscious being is 
immortal. 

The necessity of immortality is in the infinity of 
desire, which no expression satisfies. 

The Poet: Existence, consciousness, liberty, 
responsibility, are four aspects of one fact. 

The Poet: On the Body as a Vase: A liquid is 
only visible — responsible — in a vase; it can then be 
felt and handled. If the vase is broken or upset, the 
liquid escapes; and without a vase we can have no 
liquid. And yet the vase is neither the liquid, nor 
the cause of the liquid, nor does its destruction de- 
stroy the liquid. 

Thus it is with the body and desire. 
[46] 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 

The Metaphysician: That argument is purely 
negative: it does not picture the relationship between 
desire, or soul, and body; but it destroys ordinary 
materialism. 

The Poet: Consciousness, or desire, may survive, 
or reappear, even although its physical basis, the 
body, is done away with. A sensation really exists 
in us only while the physical event which causes it 
is in progress: that may be called its physical basis. 
Once that external cause is over, the sensation dies, 
that is, is forgotten, more or less quickly. But 
memory remains: so it is capable of coming again 
more or less vividly. When we need the sensation 
its responsibility recalls it — the fact that it has be- 
come a constituent part of our being, which some- 
times needs to resuscitate it. Then it comes back, 
and without its physical basis (the external event). 
Many do not come back to us. But all may; none 
are lost. We may be to the total being what such 
sensations are to us; it may behave to us as we do 
to them. 

The Psychologist: But we do not wish that all 
our life should come back, nor that it should ever be 
conscious without intermission. All we want is that 
it should come back sometimes, in its most import- 
ant parts, and so never be lost altogether. 

The Metaphysician : The existence of the higher 
inclinations of man proves the future life from the 
determinist point of view. No function but has its 
use, and its use in view of the preservation of being. 

[47] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

Evolution in this world leads towards egoism, not 
goodness, the practical, not the true, the useful, not 
the beautiful. Desire for all impersonal things, love 
for all higher things, must then be the beginning of 
an adaptation to new conditions of being, as yet un- 
perceived. We can only perceive that to which we 
are adapted. 

Hence, for us, the adaptation must prove the 
existence of a state of things to which we are being 
adapted. Desire for justice, truth, beauty, proves 
first, the existence of a world of ideas, and then the 
fact that we are destined to live in it: the kingdom 
that is not of this world. 

The Psychologist: There exists in each of us a 
sort of witness, a part which, whatever happens to 
us, whether it be suffering or joy, destruction or fear, 
is present and just looks on, unmoved, unaltered, 
eagerly on the watch, unaffected by outward or in- 
ward events. 

The Metaphysician: Is that the ultimate Self? 

The Poet: Is that the one eternal self, the 
straight line, cold, im.passible, immutable, serene, in 
full self-possession, above all individual variable 
rhythms, and living, willed, felt, incomplete, chang- 
ing desires? 

The Psychologist: It does not vary: it disap- 
pears and reappears. Life reappears or disappears 
with it. One does not exist in us without the other. 
How it goes and how it comes, passes our comprehen- 
sion. It is consciousness. All things exist only in 

[48] 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 

as far as they participate in it, as they are a sort of 
reflection of its light, among their warmth of life. It 
is impersonal: it is just as keenly interested in other 
beings as in ourselves. In it is no fear of its disap- 
pearance. Occasionally we seem to be abstracted 
from the whole of our life and for a few moments to 
live in it only. Then all things and happenings are 
indifferent to us, and all are equally important. But 
we cannot remain long in it. 

The Metaphysician: It seems to be a separate 
fragment of the total self, of the absolute, which is 
impossible in its entirety. 

THE RHYTHM OF BEING: FALL AND 
RESURRECTION 

The Psychologist: To express a desire, to ren- 
der it perfectly clear to itself, is to satisfy it. The 
aim of all desire is to become as intense — as clear and 
as conscious — as possible. 

The satisfied desire, having reached perfection, 
ceases, as all absolute being must annihilate itself. 

But in the course of its expression desire has re- 
jected all round itself an unsatisfied Inactual, which 
becomes more and more intense. Thus the satisfac- 
tion of desire is only apparent and temporary. After 
a while, its Inactual resuscitates it. 

Thus all desire, in its expression, is submitted to a 
rhythm of elevation, fall and resurrection, which is 
infinite. 

[49] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

The Metaphysician : After the fall of desire, the 
satisfied part does not come back in its previous form. 
Thus in the death of the body, the physical desires, 
which life has satisfied (or exhausted, which is the 
same) die. They no longer come back to express 
themselves in the physical body, and the body disap- 
pears. 

But those desires, in the course of their expression, 
have created subtler and unsatisfied ones, which sur- 
vive, and thus desire is subdivided into ideas. 

The Psychologist: Sleep and death belong to 
the same order of occurrences: they are falls, al- 
though in different modes, of desire into the Inactual. 

The Metaphysician : Sleep is the fall of desire in 
the course of one mode of expression.. When it comes 
back, the desire returns to the same expression as be- 
fore, in its preserved unity. Death is a fall in which 
the desire, having subdivided itself into ideas in the 
course of its expression, gives up that expression, now 
become a hindrance. 

The body is a hindrance to ideas. By its actual- 
ising power, it tends to keep us in the zone of desire: 
it is an obstacle to the subdivision of desires into 
ideas. 

At its resurrection from death, being goes on to the 
expression of its ideas, and no longer of its desires, 
which are now past. 

The Poet: During our fall, sleep or death, our 
will is exhausted : the quantity of force that came to 
us from the general being, our original Inactual, has 

[50] 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 

become perfect. So we become a sort of abstract of 
ourselves: we exist only as a possibility. 

But the general being which created us as one of 
its subdivisions cannot go on in its life without us. 
It fills us again with will, force and life, and we 
awake again and go on. 

We have gone back into our Inactual, in communi- 
cation with the All: we have become the All again, 
as we were before our birth. We have been born 
again: we have been re-filled with life universal. 

The Psychologist: We can study in ourselves 
the death of some of our desires and their transfor- 
mation into ideas which spread over the whole of our 
posterior life; also the sleep and awakening of our 
desires. 

The Metaphysician: We shall find thus the 
knowledge and the mechanism of our own immortal- 
ity. 

The Psychologist: Thus the shame and the de- 
pression after love. The perfected desire, being ex- 
pressed, falls; the rest of man feels it has been de- 
ceived. Then desires and ambitions other than the 
physical ones are necessary to keep the lovers to- 
gether. 

Thus before all intense creation comes a period of 
depression and despair. 

The Poet: Some heavy object is thrown into the 
Vv^aves, on' a sloping beach, as the tide comes up. 
Each wave has its force as it surges upward; when it 
falls, it has less power. It brings the object upwards 

[51] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

each time a little higher on the beach, and never takes 
it down. The object goes steadily upwards: it waits 
where it falls for the next wave to take it up higher. 
Thus goes desire. The waves are its successive lives; 
the intervals are its sleeps. The beach which keeps 
it up during its sleep is the whole world. If the ob- 
ject is light, the sea takes it back when retiring, and 
it does not progress. The weight of the object is the 
personal quality of each being. 

The Psychologist: Regularity is established 
when the desire has reached the highest possible in- 
tensity in the language it expresses itself in. Other- 
wise a higher expression comes and breaks the rule. 
Thus vibration is established — equality in rhythm. 
The desire, called back by the need of the world, 
returns, rapidly goes up the accustomed way, is per- 
fected and falls. Called back again, it returns again. 

The Poet: Thus the fall of a body, after a time 
of acceleration, reaches to a constant maximum 
speed. The regularity of the classics. 

The Metaphysician: The basis of all language 
is the first vibration of being: the primitive uni- 
versal rhythm : the first short ascent of being towards 
pleasure and the first fall, infinitely repeated. This 
original vibration, of matter or ether, is the physical 
element all beings are made of. All further lan- 
guage is a modification and a complication of that 
primitive rhythm, under the diversity of desires. 

The Poet: All language, all expression, is an 
arrangement of rhythms. There is a truth for 

[52] 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 

rhythms: some are found in nature, or feeling, and 
are true; some are conventional to men; some are 
original; some are common. There are the rhythms 
of nature: of the sea, for the eye and the ear; of the 
mountains, for sight and feeling; and the long slow 
rhythm of the plains. The culture of rhythms is in 
the arts. Style, which makes works of art last, is a 
matter of rhythm: it appeals in us to deeper and 
older powers than ideas : to primordial desires. 

The Metaphysician: All rhythm which we per- 
ceive interferes with the intimate rhythm of our be- 
ing, helps it or combats it in its rise and fall. In 
each being is a constant struggle with all external 
rhythms. Rhythm is the very expression of life, and 
interferes with all life. Hence its power, outside of 
and beyond what it is made conventionally to mean. 
In it is the joy of being, the elemental pleasure of life 
which finds an expression : a joy prior to all meaning 
or use or content of the expression: the first joy. 
Hence the power of music. Hence the pleasure new 
rhythms give us. 

The Poet: The power of myths, their depth, all 
we discover in them, come from the fact that they 
represent some antique elementary event of nature: 
some ancient fundamental rhythm, found under other 
layers, in all life. Hence the value of the old clas- 
sics. Hence the value of pure poetical comparison 
or imagination. Hence the help found in old myth- 
ological religions: a help which modern reasonable 
religion fails to give us. 

[53] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

The Psychologist: And yet, even the ultimate 
charm of rhythm is delusion. Music, art, poetry, in 
the end, leave life empty. What is alone worth while 
is the seeking of the knowledge of self — the desire ex- 
pressed under the languages. Rhythm is only ex- 
pression, self-knowledge is being itself. 

INTO THE WORLD OF IDEAS 

The Metaphysician: Man in his present state is 
not capable of bearing the responsibility for his ac- 
tions, which the world is perpetually throwing back 
upon him. 

The consequences of a man's actions become so 
complicated, so subtle and so far-stretching that the 
present mind of man cannot grasp them, nor his 
present nature bear the load of them. 

Therefore, immortality, which responsibility de- 
mands, and without which the world could not go on, 
cannot be the immortality of man, which would be 
totally inadequate. 

Man must be raised to a power corresponding, in 
its complexity, subtlety and scope, to the power of 
the consequences of his acts. 

Each moment in a man, each wave of desire which 
has caused some action, must become separately re- 
sponsible for it, because of the complex contradic- 
tions between the innumerable moments. 

Therefore the necessary and unavoidable respon- 
sibility of man demands his subdivision into Ideas, 

[54] 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 

which, being so much more subtle, intricate, mobile, 
and far spread, will alone be able to cope effectually 
with the consequences of a man's life, and so enable 
the world's course to go on. 

The Poet: On Resurrection: Once a desire has 
disappeared its co-desires need it for their own ex- 
istence, which has been built upon it. They will 
recreate it by their appeal to the general Inactual — 
recreate it, or its responsible ideas. 

Thus a fallen being goes through a period of fic- 
titious existence. He lives only in the memory of 
the world. The rest of Being can still build upon 
him without his actual presence, but it is on condi- 
tion that, sooner or later, he will reappear to take up 
his responsibilities. 

Thus, on waking up, we find ourselves confronted 
with all that others have done in reference to us dur- 
ing our sleep. 

So perhaps a being may reappear sooner or later, 
according to his importance to others. 

Thus resurrection becomes, through the accumula- 
ting need the world has of a being after its disap- 
pearance, an ineluctable certainty. 

The Poet: On the Other Life: The material lan- 
guage will be given up. The physical desires, having 
been expressed, will pass on to a sort of cosmic stage: 
the being we now are will appear, to the multitudi- 
nous Ideas, as the universe now appears to us. Our 
consciousness of our Ideas will be infinitely more in- 
tense than our self-consciousness, even as human 

[55] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

thought is more intense than the self-consciousness 
of the universe. 

As the laws of the world live in us, under the blos- 
soming of our desires, so our being will live under the 
marvellous multitude of the Ideas, as complete, as 
powerful as ever, and yet thrown back into darkness, 
half unconscious, eclipsed by new splendours — as the 
cosmic laws live active in us, accepted of us, half for- 
gotten. 

Thus our desires will blossom forth, changed into 
universes, covered with the innumerable Ideas sprung 
from out of our life. 

Other men, whom we have not known in life, will 
hardly exist for us, or else exist as the astronomical 
worlds now exist for our world: as an influence, as an 
enigma, points shining in the night, when our atmos- 
phere is clear. When it is disturbed by the agita- 
tions of this earth, we do not even see them. We, 
the Earth, have parted from them. Thus at death 
shall we part from men. 

But our beloved ones, whose desires have mixed 
with ours, and have, together with ours, formed new 
common desires and ideas, they will still exist for us 
and with us. In our inseparable ideas we are com- 
mingled for ever. 

Thus the Earth, Sun and Moon have kept their re- 
lationship. With our loved ones we shall be as a 
world developing in ourselves. 

The Metaphysician: Man seems to us much 
shorter-lived than universes. And so Ideas might 

[56] 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 

seem to us much shorter-lived than man. But at 
each stage of concentration the rhythm of time 
changes. Time is only our consciousness of the pass- 
ing of the Inactual into the Actual. We feel the Ac- 
tual as Past, settled, unchangeable; the Inactual as 
Future, undecided, vague. As it becomes actual, the 
future becomes the past; and we live on the present: 
the point of the meeting of the two. 

In the world of Ideas, the organization of time will 
change. As men have grouped themselves in races 
and families, so the Ideas will group themselves ac- 
cording to their affmities, irrespective of the time of 
their appearance in this world. 

The Poet: For our Ideas have associated with 
and are linked to Ideas long past or yet to come in 
human time. All those Ideas call to each other, in 
collaboration or struggle, and cannot live one v/ith- 
out the other. 

Therefore the world of Ideas can come into being 
only when the whole world of desires is accomplished. 
When physical life shall have run its course, the Ideas 
will resuscitate in a new time, in languages and in a 
grouping now inconceivable. 

Our human individuality will be dispersed over 
long periods of the ideal time, in diverse places of the 
future space, according to the innumerable variety 
of the Ideas. 

Yet it will remain one, as a cosmic desire, a phys- 
ical force or a chemical essence remains one in all be- 
ings and time. 

[57] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

The Metaphysician: Man is the ultimate ex- 
pression in the material language. The universe 
does not die to subdivide itself into men; but men 
(and thus the universe) die to subdivide themselves 
into Ideas. 

Therefore, in the normal course of time, man at 
death falls into nothingness for millions of centuries : 
until the physical universe, deprived one by one of all 
its beings, falls into nothingness: resolved into Ideas, 
perfected. 

But all existence in the fallen state, sleep or death, 
is outside time. Millions of centuries will be as a 
night's sleep. 

Then the ideal world will arise all together. 
Judged by our time, its existence will be short. Seen 
from the inside, it will be complete. 

The Poet: That is the Resurrection of the Dead, 
which is an awakening. From the moment of death 
until the resurrection there is no consciousness. 

All the dead are dead indeed: no ideal existence 
can coincide with the material world. 

Only at the end of the world is the Resurrection 
of the Dead. 



]58] 



ESCHATOLOGY 
DESTINY 

The Metaphysician: The whole of the desire of 
this world will come in time to its fulfillment and per- 
fection, like all individual beings. All that is actual 
is exhaustible. 

But behind matter, and in it, is the infinite element 
which is the basis of all things and beings. All we 
know of that element shows us that it registers and 
keeps and accumulates all that happens, and lets 
nothing be lost. It could not otherwise have risen to 
man, in whom all its previous experiences are com- 
pressed and gathered up. 

The Poet: Therefore, this world itself having 
disappeared altogether, will yet remain as a possibil- 
ity and an experience and an acquirement of the 
Total Being. The Inactual, ever unsatisfied, will cre- 
ate then new worlds, or keep them going after this 
has gone. Thus it will base itself in its further ex- 
pression upon this lost expression, and will need it 
more and more, until it has to re-create it. 

But then it will be re-created in new circumstances; 
it will be altered by the appearance of all that came 
after its fall. Thus it will be both identical and dif- 
ferent, in so far as the difi'erences will only be a 

[59] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

greater degree of expression called for by the surging 
of new responsibilities. For the new worlds demand 
that it should be that very same world upon which 
they have based themselves. 

The Metaphysician: Thus a plan of Being ex- 
ists, in the manner in which a plan exists in the seed 
of a tree, liable to be modified, but bound to be ac- 
complished, and accomplished completely. Being re- 
peats itself, as a tree come out of a seed repeats the 
previous tree, that is, more or less. But it has all the 
possibilities that ever were expressed in all the pre- 
vious trees that went to its making. 

So that, sooner or later, each individual trait of 
any individual tree of the past must be repeated in 
some future tree, since the spreading out of Being is 
infinite. Besides which, new traits will be added. 

Such is our immortality, our resurrection, which is 
the same fact as the reproduction we witness in all 
species. 

Thus we shall come back, as we are, in a future 
world, which will be this world, more or less modi- 
fied, and in different circumstances, but essentially 
still us, and still this world. 

When this world will reproduce itself, and be pro- 
duced again, it will reproduce us also. 

The Poet: The ideas are the flowers of this tree 
of our Life: in relation to the production of them it 
is planned: they determine the plan. 

The Metaphysician: This plan of Being is Des- 
tiny. Known at any moment, it would enable us to 

[60] 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 

foresee only the general directions of the future, but 
not precise events, for the plan is ever in the making. 
At any moment the Inactual interferes with it by the 
creation of new beings. Thus no being is ever forced 
by Destiny to do any precise thing, as in any organ- 
ism no cell is ever forced to do anything against its 
will. But Destiny depends upon the fact that the 
will shall work in a certain direction. If it does not, 
if the individual does not conform to Destiny, meas- 
ures are taken against him; he is extinguished and 
expelled, as an organism extinguishes and expels a 
rebellious part. 

The Poet: Sometimes it does not succeed in do- 
ing so: hence disease and death. But generally it 
does, because the greatest number of parts remain 
true to the covenant. 

The Metaphysician: It may thus be said that 
each being is eternally present and developing, but 
the world forgets this while it does not need it. 

The Poet: Our dreams might as well complain 
of being forgotten on our waking up, as we of not 
being perpetually immortal. 

The Metaphysician: By far the largest part of 
our actions are unwilled: all the motions in any act 
we perform, all their consequences we let loose upon 
the air, the ground, other beings, are not of our 
willing. We pursue an aim. The aim alone is ours. 
In the means used we follow only one series of con- 
sequences, that which leads to our aim ; but number- 
less others are set working. 

[61] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

Our conscious will uses only a small part of our 
actions. All the unwilled, all that is merely un- 
valued means to our aim, all we let loose upon the 
world, is the stuff Destiny works upon, and it is the 
largest part of our lives. The world has to see to it, 
to account for it. 

The Poet: Thus with the insect: Destiny has 
regulated it. While it only looks for food or satis- 
fies some obscure need for activity, it accomplishes 
huge and complicated works it knows nothing of, 
perpetuates its race and fulfils many useful tasks in 
the world. 

Even so we are used by Destiny, and see no more 
of its aims than the insect does. 

The Metaphysician: On the Idea of Cause: 

All the elements of a fact being present, it 
need not follow that the fact should come to 
pass. The whole is greater than the sum of the 
parts. 

The Poet: Something inactual comes into it as 
well. 

The Metaphysician: Reality is less highly or- 
ganised than our intelligence. History is full of 
accidents which are the explosions of the Inactual, 
and sometimes witnesses an inexplicable wrong-going 
of things, where the study of the causes gives no 
satisfaction. 

The Poet: Accidents are the intervention of 
metaphysics into physics. 

The Metaphysician: The world requires that 
[62] 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 

all we have chosen to be should be accomplished : we 
took upon ourselves at our birth a part of the general 
being; the world took that into account and acted 
upon that understanding. 

Thus the intense appeal of the world compels : 

To total action those that do not act their will: 
in accidents and wars. 

To total suffering those that have not suffered 
their lot: in illnesses. 

To total thinking those that have not thought out 
their thought : in madness. 

For in such cases we become instruments of the 
world's action, or suffering, or thought, even as the 
insects are. 

There are then two sorts of men : 

Those who accomplish their destiny, 

And those whose destiny is accomplished upon 
them. 

The Poet: Wars, accidents, illnesses, madness 
are like uncaused explosions of a destiny which has 
not been accomplished willingly, of a tremendous 
will which it was our duty to express and which we 
have not expressed. Such explosions break across 
all our logic and order. 

The Psychologist: The submission to a destiny 
we have not willed is repaid to us by knowledge; of 
ourselves in unwilled circumstances, of others, to 
whom we are submitted, of the system of the world, 
seen from inside. The inactive participant sees 
things from inside whereas the active participant sees 

[63] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

himself chiefly, and others only as a resistance to his 
action. 

The Metaphysician: Instinct is the carrying 
out of a plan of which we are not conscious. It oc- 
cupies the greater part of our lives. 

The Poet: The laws of nature are the instincts 
of the world. 

The Psychologist: We will, eternally, all that 
is, since the whole of being wills the whole of its ex- 
pression, and we are a part of it. 

The only philosophical attitude is communion with 
reality: the affirmation of life. Liberty is the es- 
sence of the world: all that happens comes from some 
free being; every being is completely free and ex- 
presses its will completely. All will is done. Our 
will at present will be done, and therefore is done. 
All we seem to have to bear is the battle we fight to 
create the state of the world in which our will is done. 
Or our will is done, our desire is perfected and ex- 
hausted and satisfied, in the fighting. 

The Poet: As, confronted with any event, the 
ancients said: ''It is the will of God: let the will of 
God be done"; so we must learn to say: ''It is our 
will; let our will be done.'' 

THE IDEAS 

The Psychologist: Original ideas come not 
through research and meditation, but of themselves, 
when they please — often at times inconvenient to us. 

[64] 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 

We are not their masters. They leave us only when 
they are complete; and they pour forth their as- 
sociations without taking into account our desires or 
needs. 

They exalt our beings and then, physically even, 
exhaust us in their expression in us. 

Unless we write them down and so capture them, 
they often disappear never to return. And they 
must be captured swiftly, for they are elusive. Our 
brain and consciousness are too weak for them. 

Pascal gives witness: ''Hasard donne les pen- 
sees; hasard les ote; point d'art pour conserver 
ni pour acquerir; Pensee echappee, je la voulais 
ecrire; j'ecris, au lieu, qu'elle m'est echappee; cela 
me fait souvenir de ma faiblesse, que j'oublie a toute 
heure." 

When we begin writing them down, we know not 
where they may lead us. Often, we see at first only 
their insignificant parts. 

They lead us absolutely. 

Nietzsche says: "Man hort, man sucht nicht; 
man nimmt, man fragt nicht wer da giebt; wie ein 
Blitz leuchtet ein Gedanke auf, mit Nothwendigkeit, 
in der Form ohne Zogern; ich habe nie eine Wahl 
gehabt." 

Hence the poverty of our expression when we write 
them down; we do not understand them well; we 
torture or spoil them. What we put down is not 
the Ideas, but our imperfect remembrance of their 
coming: our impressions at their visitation. 

[65] 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 

Rousseau: ''Si j'avais jamais pu ecrire le quart 
de ce que j'ai vu et senti, sous cet arbre! Tout ce 
que j'ai pu retenir de ces foules de grandes verites 
qui, en un quart d'heure, m'illuminerent sous cet 
arbre, a ete bien faiblement epars dans les trois prin- 
cipaux de mes ecrits." 

Nietzsche: ''Ach, was seid ihr doch ihre meine 
geschriebenen und gemalten Gedanken — Niemand 
errath mir daraus, wie ihr in eurem Morgen aussahet, 
ihr plotzlichen Funken und Wunder meiner Einsam- 
keit, ihr meine alten geliebten, schlimmen Gedan- 
ken!" 

Therefore other men rarely recognise the primitive 
force of our ideas; great artists are those that can 
impress men with that force. 

Often the Ideas come in multitudes; we cannot 
write them down all at once; they are too numerous; 
they have to wait. One crosses our mind while we 
write down another, unsettles it — sometimes causes 
it to be lost; sometimes gets lost itself. 

Thus many are lost, as with Rousseau. 

There must have existed many thinkers who lived 
only for the exhausting pleasure that Ideas give; not 
caring to transmit them on to men. Others who, 
once back into their normal state, did not believe 
in them, nor in their importance. 

Others who have considered them undesirable, 
because of the suffering of physical and intellectual 
exhaustion which they cause. 

Hence the modesty of true genius; men of genius 
{66^ 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

know Ideas do not come from them, nor are under 
their control. 

Nietzsche: "Man wiirde in der That die Vor- 
stellung, bios Inkarnation, bios Mundstiick, bios 
Medium libermachtiger Gewalten zu sein, kaum 
abzuweisen wissen." 

The Metaphysician: Things happen as though 
the Ideas existed, independently of us, and used our 
consciousness to express themselves intensely for one 
moment, then disappeared, without troubling about 
us. We keep only the remembrance of them. 

And that is even what happens. 

In the subdivision of being — Universes, Men, 
Ideas — the Ideas are superior to us in will and in- 
tensity, as much as we are superior to the earth. 
The plan of being is made in relation to them, with 
an aim to the production of them; it is made by 
them, more than by the rest of beings. Thus, each 
such Idea is a being superior to us, infinitely more 
intense, which is born, lives and dies in us, as we in 
the earth. 

They seem to be parts of us; they are so, as the 
more precise is a part of the less concentrated; so we 
are not their masters, but they ours. 

The rest of our lives is organised from our re- 
membrance of them. 

Born into us, from parts of us which concentrate 
themselves, the Ideas raise and enlighten us at their 
birth, but they cannot live in the material world. 
Their presence itself disorganises our physical func- 

[67] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

tions: breathing and circulation are upset, the head 
is disturbed, the brain rapidly exhausted. If their 
intensity were continual, madness would seize us. 
Thus, in the struggle against material expressions, 
the Ideas fall. 

The Poet: They will come back in the ideal 
world, at the end of physical time. It is enough 
for them to have been born. Henceforth immortal, 
they can wait securely for the world to come. 

The Psychologist: Our chief mistake lies in 
thinking that we produce them. 

The Poet: The ancients were wiser, who be- 
lieved in Revelation. The Ideas do reveal them- 
selves to us: the initiative of their coming belongs 
to them. They exist ever in their abstractions, in 
their possibilities, as parts of us, intense and strong — 
as men, going forth into the waste earth, are stronger 
and more intense than it. The earth neither pro- 
duces nor leads them, except in a vague general way 
of which she is not the mistress, but of which they 
are the masters. So the Ideas come into us, if they 
find favourable ground, and while in us reign over 
us as men reign over the land. We may prepare 
the ground for them, call them. ''But will they 
come when we do call for them?" Genius is visited 
by them. Talent studies them, which is our duty. 
As the earth can crush and end us, accidently, so 
can we the Ideas, by ignorance and mishap, for they 
are the best of us. 

The Metaphysician : So they come by their will 
[68] 



METAPHYSICAL DIALOGUES 

more than by ours, according to the general Plan 
of Being, which they had more share in the making 
of than we had. They accomplish, beyond us, the 
passing of Desire into Ideas. 

The Poet: The Spirit bloweth where it listeth. 
The ancient theories of divine inspiration are there- 
fore true. At the foundation of religions were the 
revelations of Ideas to the prophets. And in times 
of old, the powers of our senses being fresher and 
greater, the power of our intellect less formal, the 
sense that the Ideas came from beyond us predomi- 
nated, and we cast them forth into the outer world, 
in the shape of radiant apparitions or divine voices. 
The Gods were seen of old by the prophets, and may 
still be seen by prophets to-day. And nevertheless 
all vision of the Gods is delusion. 

The Psychologist: Another mistake of ours is 
to mix with our perception of the Ideas our own 
interpretation of them : our ordinary knowledge and 
intellect. And that mistake is well-nigh unavoid- 
able. Thus in the books of man, among the gen- 
eral ruin of systems, Ideas remain and shine here 
and there, from antiquity to the present day, as 
great and impressive of old as now, and now as of 
old. 

The Poet: Thus it has been truly said that the 
aim of mankind is the production of men of genius, 
for in them the Ideas incarnate. And so by them 
the Plan of the World is partially revealed to us. 

The Metaphysician: And it behoves the so- 
[69] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

cieties of men to be careful and arrange themselves 
in harmony with the Plan of Being: else they run 
into catastrophe. The world cannot live without or- 
ganisation; and it has no road to organisation ex- 
cept by the fitful light of the passing Ideas. 

The Psychologist: What we call an idea, in 
our language, is only the remembrance, the written 
or spoken expression we kept of an Idea. The Idea 
is that part of us which lived in us for a moment of 
a superhuman life, when we ''conceived" it. There- 
after it was dead; we remember it, speak of it to 
our brothers, rouse in them similar Ideas, if their 
desires will be responsive to our expressions. 

The Metaphysician: An Idea, coming to us, is 
necessarily true. It is utterly beyond our intellect, 
and our individual experience, and the experience 
of our race: it is verily incommensurable with them. 
Therefore it comes from none of these springs, but 
from the deeper grounds of Being, and is necessarily 
true. 

The Psychologist: But in trying to express it, 
even to ourselves, we immediately and unavoidably 
mix it with our customary errors. Originality of 
mind is no sign that the Ideas are present. It is no 
condition of their coming. Sometimes it warps them, 
sometimes it helps them. Originality belongs to the 
world of men, and is not genius, which is the faculty 
of receiving the Ideas. 

The Poet: Thus are the purposes of this world 
fulfilled: in the passing of Desire into Ideas. 

[70] 



PRINCIPIA METAPHYSICA 



I. ONTOLOGY: THE ACTUAL AND THE 
INACTUAL 

(1) Every existence is infinite; every expression is 
limited. The expression of any thought or being is 
necessarily incomplete. 

(2) There are two parts in every being: the Ac- 
tual, which is the expressed, and the Inactual, which 
is the unexpressed, and they grow together, infinitely, 
the one out of the other. 

(3) The aim of every being is to express itself: 
to render as intense (as conscious) as possible the 
desires which are its essence. 

(4) To express itself. Being has to concentrate on 
some chosen part of itself, and to reject other parts; 
thus, in its expression. Being divides and sub-divides 
itself into individuals. 

(5) Pain and Pleasure are the twin concomitants 
of creation, which is expression, which is division. 

(6) Pleasure is the self-consciousness of desire: 
the aim of every being. 

(7) Pain is the consciousness of loss which accom- 
panies the rejection by Desire of part of itself in the 
course of its expression. 

(8) There is in every being the instinct of con- 
centration: of the necessity to choose and reject. 

[73] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

(9) Concentration in a Universe produces men; in 
a man, ideas. 

(10) The Inactual is common to all: individuals 
are concentrations of the One inactual Being in dif- 
ferent directions. 



II. COSMOLOGY: LANGUAGES AND 
CONVENTIONS 

(11) Being expresses itself through languages. 

(12) Languages are established by Conventions, 
which are necessary collaborations of certain catego- 
ries of beings to help each other in their expression. 

(13) Matter is the language of desire on the plane 
of the Universes. 

(14) Action is the language of desire on the plane 
of men. 

(15) In speech and art are the beginnings of the 
language of desire on the plane of ideas. (Most 
speech is action.) 

(16) Beings, in their expression of themselves, 
modify the Inactual around them. As the Inactual 
is common to all, beings communicate with each 
other through their perception of the modification of 
the Inactual. 

(17) The senses are the powers which translate 
perceptions of the modifications of the Inactual into 
languages. 

(18) In the organization of the world, the pain 

[74] 



PRINCIPIA METAPHYSICA 

which emanates from all creative activity is being 
perpetually rejected: partially non-expressed. A 
quantity of suffering accumulates in the Inactual, 
and tries to express itself through individuals. That 
is the Evil Element in the Universe: Evil is pain 
felt separately from its cause, creation. 

(19) The Conventions protect against evil the be- 
ings that belong to them. 

(20) Accidents are violations of Conventional 
laws. Such violations, being outside the protection 
of the Convention, entail suffering. 

(21) Man belongs to two Conventions: — ^The 
Universal Convention: which is the Material Con- 
vention; the Human Convention: which is the Moral 
Convention. 

(22) Man's specific work is to prepare the third 
Convention: the Convention of Ideas, which is the 
Metaphysical Convention. 

III. PSYCHOLOGY: FALL AND 
RESURRECTION 

(23) Existence entails responsibility. 

(24) Responsibility entails immortality. 

(25) Liberty is the power of expressing one's 
desires; it is a concomitant of responsibility; and 
both, of existence itself. 

(26) As every being is infinite, liberty entails im- 
mortality. 

[75] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

(27) The foundation in men of the world of Ideas 
is the beginning of an immortality which is continued 
in a different order of being. 

(28) When a desire has reached the highest in- 
tensity it is capable of, it ceases and falls: Perfec- 
tion is annihilation. 

(29) A fall is a return into the ever-unsatisfied In- 
actual, which refills the fallen being with new forces, 
and resurrects it. Desire follows an infinite rhythm 
of rise, fall and resurrection. 

(30) There are two forms of Fall: sleep and death. 
In sleep a desire comes back as desire, in the same 
expression; in death, a desire gives up its former ex- 
pression, and comes back on the next plane, sub- 
divided into ideas. 

(31) Ideas need a new language, as matter is too 
ponderous an expression for them. The formation 
of the world of ideas entails the death of the material 
Universe. 

(32) The basis of all language is the elementary 
vibration of the Inactual, the first rise and fall of 
desire. Thus all language, all expression, is rhythm. 

IV. ESCHATOLOGY: DESTINY 

(33) Universes also reach Perfection and die, in 
the world of Ideas and the realisation of the Meta- 
physical Convention. 

(34) Nothing is ever lost for the Inactual; and 
the Inactual never ceases from creating. 

[76] 



PRINCIPIA METAPHYSICA 

(35) A fallen world is reproduced in new circum- 
stances: that is, among new worlds which the In- 
actual has created during the fall-period of that 
world. 

(36) Every being reappears in and with its world, 
again and again in new circumstances. 

(37) There exists for each being a permanent Ab- 
straction, which is its true imperishable essence: a 
plan of that being, which life makes real again and 
again in varying circumstances. 

(38) There exists a Plan of all Abstractions, which 
is Destiny; but the Inactual is for ever coming into 
the Plan with new creations. 

(39) In Destiny the will, or desire, of each being 
is completely accomplished. 

(40) Destiny is the will of the Total Being, which 
is One: The One striving towards Self-Conscious- 
ness for ever, as its self-consciousness has its infini- 
tude for object, and the Inactual grows with the 
growth of the Actual. 

V. ETHICS 

The duty of man is to be at once the Discoverer 
and the Creator of Being, by reaching full self- 
consciousness: 

(41) To understand the will of the Total Being, 
and to understand that his own will is identical with 
it. 

(42) To feel, in pleasure, the development of the 

[77] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

Total Being, and to bear, in pain, his own share of 
the suffering of Creation. 

(43) To act: to express in his languages the Total 
Being: that is, on man's plane, to resolve the desires 
given him into ideas: to carry out the Moral Con- 
vention; and to lay the foundations of the Metaphys- 
ical Convention. 



[78] 



PRINCIPIA METAPHYSICA: A COM- 
MENTARY 

I. ONTOLOGY: THE ACTUAL AND THE 
INACTUAL 

L Every existence is infinite; every expression is 
limited. The expression of any thought or being 
is necessarily incomplete. 

I say: ''A man is going by in the street." It is 
impossible for me to express all I can see and feel 
about that man; it is impossible for me even to see 
or feel it; it does not even interest me. For in- 
stance, I do not take any notice of the colour of his 
hair, the length of his coat, the expression on his 
face; the analysis of any feature would spread into 
the infinite. I choose to select the very general fact 
that he belongs to the human species, and I go into 
no details. To get all the details, I should have to 
fix him at one particular unit of time; it is conceiv- 
able that then the total of the details would be finite. 
But the next instant most of the elements of the pic- 
ture: his position, his expression, etc., would have 
changed; and no unit of time is short enough for me 
to catch him in a static position. He is in a perpet- 
ual transformation, and therefore infinite. To say 
anything about him, I have to choose what interests 
me in him, and leave out the rest: otherwise, I could 

[79] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

say nothing. And even if I could say everything 
about him, it would come to the same result as saying 
nothing, since in a complete description of him there 
would be no purpose. I should have insisted on noth- 
ing, and a listener would not know the aim or point of 
my speech: I could proceed to no deduction. My 
thought about the man would not have progressed. 
Thus all expression, all thinking even, is choosing; 
and is by nature, even by aim, incomplete. 

2. There are two parts in every being: the Actual 
which is the expressed, and the Inactual, which is 
the unexpressed, and they grow together infinitely, 
the one out of the other. 

The distinction is not between the Conscious and 
the Unconscious. The word "Unconscious" is a 
mere negative, and may cover widely different cate- 
gories of being. Thus, many things for us become 
unconscious because they are expressed, absolutely in 
the actual, and so trouble us no more: for instance, 
in part, our past. Also some things are unconscious 
because they are quite inactual still for us and far 
from being expressed: for instance, our future. The 
Inactual is the infinite mass of our possibilities which 
we have not expressed yet; our future belongs to it; 
some of our past also, because it may recur. The In- 
actual grows with the growth of the Actual, because 
to actualise anything, we reject parts of it, which cre- 
ates problems. When I say ''A man is going by" — 
having chosen to concentrate on the motion of the 

[80] 



PRINCIPIA METAPHYSICA 

man, I create new problems, as: Where is he going 
to? What is he going there for? etc., problems which 
were not in my consciousness while I was merely look- 
ing at the man without expressing anything about 
him. 

A new Inactual is thus created with every new Ac- 
tual; and inversely, from that new Inactual a new 
Actual will come : the answers to the above questions : 
Where? What for? etc., and this new Actual in 
turn will create a new Inactual; and so on ad infin- 
itum. 

3. The aim of every being is to express itself: to 
render as intense (as conscious) as possible the 
desires which are its essence. 

When we abstract ourselves from the outside world; 
at a quiet moment, close our eyes, listen to nothing 
outside, and just feel our existence, if we are in good 
health, we perceive and enjoy in ourselves a sort of 
warm vibration or rippling current of life, which is 
pure pleasure, which is pure desire. That is the very 
essence of our being. In certain acts of ours, it be- 
comes more intense, and bursts out into our ordinary 
crowded and busy life: in eating when we are hungry, 
in physical or mental exercise, in love. The aim of 
all our acts is to intensify that desire, to increase that 
pleasure of life: generally, our work is designed to 
get the means to that increase: food, exercise, love, 
etc. But whatever the means, the aim is the same, 
whether it be in the lowest sensualism, or in the purest 

[81] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

joys of asceticism or intellectuality. We can even 
perceive, when we get to that fundamental desire in 
us, that it has a sort of impersonal quality: it is not 
so much particularly 'us" as running through us. It 
is not only our being, but the general being, there is in 
it communion with the whole of being, of nature, ani- 
mals, trees and waters and air. Indeed many people 
are conscious of it only in the presence of nature, not 
being able to get to it sufficiently in themselves, ow- 
ing to ill health or other causes. 

4. To express itself Being has to concentrate on 
some chosen part of itself, and to reject other parts; 
thus, in its expression, Being divides and subdivides 
itself into individuals. 

The only grounds we have to judge the General 
Being by are the facts of our experience. There we 
touch reality, however limited; and we must use our 
intelligence in trying to see how the limitation works, 
and how much of our experience is the General Be- 
ing's. As we are parts of the General Being, its 
ways are to be seen in us. Thus, psychological ex- 
perience is the basis of metaphysics. Metaphysics 
is the psychology of the Universe. 

Besides which, we cannot help ourselves. As we 
cannot know anything else, we have to judge by our 
own experience. Only we must be careful not to mix 
the abstract workings of our intelligence with the 
facts of our psychological experience. Our intel- 
ligence is a tool; we must apply it to facts, and not 

[82] 



PRINCIPIA METAPHYSICA 

allow it to produce conceptions mechanically by 
working upon itself and its processes and not upon 
facts. When it works upon itself, intelligence pro- 
duces logic, which is a fine, interesting and instruc- 
tive fabric, but has only the slenderest connections 
with reality. We must beware of admitting pure 
logic into metaphysics, and base metaphysics on ex- 
perience and reason which is the perception and or- 
ganization of experience by intelligence. 

We have then to assume that things happen in the 
General Being as they do in us. Trying to express 
itself, the General Being separates one Actual from 
its Inactual. Then, in that rejected Inactual, an- 
other Actual concentrates; and so on, as conceptions 
are produced in us. Each Actual thus formed in 
the General Being is an individual. 

5. Pain and Pleasure are the twin concomitants of 
creation, which is expression, which is division. 

When the Inactual concentrates itself, on one hand 
it increases the intensity of some of its desires, and 
that is the production of pleasure. But at the same 
time, a new Inactual is created, and, for the moment, 
anyhow, refused expression. Desire is torn into two 
parts: one is satisfied, and gives pleasure; the other is 
rejected and becomes pain: unsatisfied desire. 

Thus in work, there is first a pleasure, the intensifi- 
cation of desire by expression; but there is an effort, 
which is a pain, which soon culminates in fatigue and 
actual suffering. Therefore, in human beings, at the 

[83] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

same time as desire for work, there is laziness, a re- 
pulsion in front of work: a fear of the suffering in it. 
Thus : 

6. Pleasure is the self-consciousness of desire, the 
aim of every being: as has been explained under 
3; and 

7. Pain is the consciousness of loss which accom- 
panies the rejection by desire of part of itself in the 
course of its expression. 

8. There is in every being the instinct of concen- 
tration : of the necessity to choose and reject. 

Since Being progresses on the lines of division and 
concentration, every individual has in himself that 
same need. 

Intellectual consciousness is produced, as we have 
seen under 1, by concentration; by choosing one line 
of thought and rejecting all the others. 

Moral conscience is the same process applied to 
action: man has realized since he began to be man 
that out of all the actions possible to him, he must 
choose some coherent course. He has deliberately 
forbidden himself to do a great number of things, 
which he has marked as evil; he has chosen some 
channels of action which he has called good. Thus 
he has developed out of animality, savagery, barba- 
rism, into civilization. That instinct of concentration 
must be very deep-rooted in man, since, after all the 
orgies and ecstasies of lust, bloodshed and brutality 
of history, and in the middle of the welter of passions 
and ignominies of present mankind, moral conscience 

[84] 



PRINCIPIA METAPHYSICA 

still exists, and, in the best individuals, is probably 
stronger than ever; and, ultimately, makes a bid for 
the political government of mankind. And there re- 
mains always, in the moral conscience, in intellectual 
processes, in chastity, in jealousy, the same deep 
sense that some things must not be done, that a being 
has to concentrate in one direction, whatever be the 
suffering to be borne. 

9. Concentration in a Universe produces men; in 
a man, ideas. 

The matter of the Universe, elaborated by a special 
process which concentrates infinite powers into very 
small particles, ultimately produces men. 

Thus the desires of man ultimately produce ideas. 
Take the idea expressed by the word patriotism. 
Man has originally a feeling of comfort and security 
in the existence of a group of men who have interests 
in common with him, who help him and protect him. 
That is a pure feeling, or desire. Then, in the course 
of its expression, that feeling becomes subdivided into 
several others: a feeling for the family; one for 
friends; one for superiors in the social order; one for 
servants; one for the group as a whole. Each of 
these feelings develops on its own lines. In the feel- 
ing for the group as a whole, again several elements 
concentrate; until at last there emerges one very 
precise, complicated, "sub-divided" feeling, extremely 
self-conscious of its aims, which we call "patriotism." 
As it has become conscious of many complications 

[85] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

which were not in the primitive feeling, we call it an 
"idea." But patriotism varies in each man: there 
is A's patriotism, B's, and so on. And even in each 
man it varies: it generally is quite dormant, and 
comes to the foreground of consciousness for quite a 
short time occasionally. So in each of us there are 
many patriotisms which are born and die; each being 
a feeling of some duration and intense self-conscious- 
ness. Such summits of waves of desire I shall call 
"ideas.'' An idea is an individual being, a desire 
which lives in us for a certain short period in a very 
intense state, much more intense than our ordinary 
life; just as a man lives in a universe. Just as we say 
"man," or "American" to cover, to name, a great 
number of beings, thus we give the name "patriot- 
ism" to a whole nation of "ideas," each individual 
and different and transitory. But for the purpose of 
these metaphysics, an idea shall mean such a being. 
Thus ideas come from desires, as men come from 
Universes. 

10. The Inactual is common to all; individuals 
are concentrations of the One Inactual Being in 
different directions. 

In the General Being one Actual being crystallises; 
all that is left out still belongs to the General Being, 
not to the Actual. Thus what a man has not ex- 
pressed does not belong to him : there is even a pre- 
cise feeling of being robbed, of suffering personal 
injury, when somebody else expresses something 

[86] 



PRINCIPIA METAPHYSICA 

which we might have, but have not, expressed. And 
verily we left it in the Inactual and someone else did 
take it. The possibilities of our being extend, back- 
wards, going up the course of concentration, to the 
whole General Being, where they naturally interpene- 
trate and are one with the possibilities of all other 
beings. 

But also, naturally, there are several degrees of 
concentration of the Inactual, and in that sense, the 
Inactual from which we have derived our actuality is 
nearer to us that the General Being, is more particu- 
larly our Inactual. Much as men have a country 
which they belong to, more precisely than they be- 
long to the whole of mankind. But that country is 
not theirs, as individuals, exclusively: each shares it 
with a number of others. It is thus with the differ- 
ent degrees of concentration of the Inactual, and 
with what we may call "our" Inactual. 

Thus, there are three stages of being which we are 
clearly conscious of: the General Being subdivides 
and concentrates into universes; a universe sub- 
divides and concentrates into men; a man subdivides 
and concentrates into ideas. 

II. COSMOLOGY: LANGUAGES AND 
CONVENTIONS 

11. Being expresses itself through languages. 

Language has two important functions: an indi- 
vidual function and a social function. 

[87] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

In the individual it actualises the desires, it gives 
them a tangible, precise, conscious form. Thus, 
there is in our brain a perpetual monologue going on ; 
and all our thoughts appear to us precisely in words. 
Not that words, or expression, are the first immediate 
perception we have of our thoughts. Before words, 
we have the thoughts in a vague state, as intuitions, 
feelings; complex, sometimes instantaneous; but we 
immediately translate them into words and thus fix 
them. It is, however, possible for us to perceive fre- 
quently the first stage of wordless thought : but it is 
very elusive; we experience it best when it happens 
that our mind is busy at a time when some intuition 
or perception comes upon us ; we defer for a moment 
putting it into words, because we are putting some- 
thing else into words just then. And often it escapes 
us without having been actualised. 

The social role of language, which is to make us 
communicate with our fellow-beings, is metaphysi- 
cally much more complicated, and falls under episte- 
mology. (See 12 to 16.) 

12. Languages are established by Conventions, 
which are necessary collaborations of certain cat- 
egories of beings to help each other in their ex- 
pression. 

No being could have time or strength enough to 
establish a complete system of language; and if he 
did, that language would not fulfil its second func- 
tion, of social intercourse, since no one else would 

[88] 



PRINCIPIA METAPHYSICA 

understand it. Madmen occasionally succeed par- 
tially in creating a language peculiar to themselves, 
and thus get out of harmony and communication 
with the rest of men; but it may perfectly satisfy 
them personally. 

But normal beings copy their languages from each 
other, thus reserving the greater part of their energy 
for the expression of themselves in those languages. 

But no language can be created which is common 
to the whole of Being, on account of the Inactual 
which remains, and goes on creating, outside any 
circle whatever. Therefore, collaborations are lim- 
ited. Some great groups are formed of beings which, 
being drawn from the same Inactual, have similar 
aims, and can use a more or less common language. 
Also, no two beings can have absolutely the same 
language, since they have different desires to ex- 
press. And the more complicated beings become, the 
more subdivided and subtle their desires, the smaller 
is the group of beings they can collaborate with, until 
the subtlest artists create, on the basis of the com- 
mon languages, a personal means of expression which 
we have to learn in order to understand them. They 
do it by giving new and subtler meanings to words 
or signs already in use. 

13. Matter is the language of desire on the plane 
of the Universes. 

Matter is a language. Not metaphorically, as 
Carlyle might say it was a garment, but in reality. 

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THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

It is a means of expression which fulfils the two func- 
tions of language, the individual and the social. 

Individually, we use matter to make our desires 
more intense, to satisfy them: thus we build houses, 
we grow food, we eat, etc., to fulfil certain needs of 
ours; even as we use words to express certain concep- 
tions, which is also to satisfy certain needs. 

Socially, we use matter to apprise other beings of 
our existence and desires: thus we put a wall round 
our properties to mark them as ours to other beings. 

Animals and plants also use matter to the same 
ends: a plant organises matter into wood to give it- 
self a solid place in the world, into chlorophyll to 
feed itself, etc. 

We deduce from that that lower stages of matter 
are simply the expressions of less differentiated de- 
sires, which use matter on their plane as we use it on 
ours. We can experience that fact in our body: deep 
and powerful, but vague and semi-unconscious desires 
build up and organize the matter of our bodies, desires 
which our more conscious desires are built upon, and 
which preside over the digestive, circulatory, breath- 
ing and reproductive functions. We can often ex- 
perience the change of both desire and matter simul- 
taneously in our bodies, and see that the variations of 
the second satisfy the first. 

Now the language of matter is subject to laws, even 
as speech is; but the language of matter is used by 
the whole physical universe, spreading as far as we 
can perceive. Its laws are the result of the collabora- 

[90] 



PRINCIPIA METAPHYSICA 

tion, of the action in common, of the whole physical 
universe, and our part as men in that collaboration is 
small. We accept that language more than we create 
it. 
Matter is the language of the Universes. 

14. Action is the language of desire on the plane 
of men. 

Men have more subtle and precise desires than the 
Universe. Therefore they use the language of matter 
as an artist uses the language of speech: they give 
to it new and subtler meanings. 

For instance, a rock falls from a mountain and kills 
some animal; or a man kills the animal by crushing 
it under a rock. The same material expression has 
been used. But man has put a purpose into it which 
is much subtler and more precise than the vague pur- 
pose of gravitation behind the natural event. That 
difference of complexity, that further degree of sub- 
division in the desire, makes of men's actions a lan- 
guage different from that of the events of the Uni- 
verse. 

15. In speech and art are the beginnings of the 
language of desire on the plane of ideas. (Most 
speech is action.) 

Ideas begin to exist in men. And they are infi- 
nitely more complex and subtle than men. They 
need, therefore, a means of expression correspond- 
ingly subtle and complex. That necessity caused the 

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THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

formation of speech, which is modified much more 
easily than matter, because the collaboration that 
forms it is much smaller and much more easily in- 
fluenced. But man uses speech first as a means to 
clarify and express his purpose in action, to prepare 
and organise action. Speech is properly a language 
of transition : of the period during which desires sub- 
divide into ideas. Therefore most speech is action. 
But in the arts, which have no purpose on the plane 
of action, and should aim only at expressing ideas, 
man is beginning to lay the foundations of a lan- 
guage of ideas, in which speech shall have a part 
also. 

16. Beings, in their expression of themselves, mod- 
ify the Inactual around them. As the Inactual is 
common to all, beings communicate with each other 
through their perception of the modifications of the 
Inactual. 

When we act or express something, we actualise a 
part of the Inactual. The next being who wants 
to express a desire similar to ours will find a differ- 
ence in the Inactual: it will be either easier, or more 
difficult, for him to express himself. Just as, if we 
put a wall across a path, people going along the path 
will perceive it; or people building another wall near 
ours or upon ours will be helped by it. Those differ- 
ences in the resistance of the Inactual to a being's 
actions are the source of that being's perceptions of 
the outside world. He has a great part in common 

[92] 



PRINCIPIA METAPHYSICA 

with the outside world, when the world modifies that 
part, the being necessarily feels it. 

For the purposes of collaboration, beings modify 
the Inactual purposely, in order to affect their fellow- 
beings and convey definite impressions to them. 
Languages are thus wilfully organised modifications 
of the Inactual. Thus matter exists outside us as 
the sum of the modifications, which all beings using 
it have brought into the Inactual. This view of 
matter as a language synthesises the opposing views 
of idealism — since the language of matter is a crea- 
tion of a collaboration; and realism — since at the 
same time it has an outside and independent reality. 
The vibration which is the basis of all language, mat- 
ter as well as speech, is an elementary vibration of 
the Inactual which is considered under 32. From 
this follows the definition of the senses, since meta- 
physically, 

17. The senses are the powers which translate 
perceptions of the modifications of the Inactual into 
languages, 

that is, vibrations into matter, colour, sound, etc. 

18. In the organisation of the world, the pain 
which emanates from all creative activity is being 
perpetually rejected: partially non-expressed. A 
quantity of suffering accumulates in the Inactual 
and tries to express itself through individuals. That 
is the Evil Element in the Universe. Evil is pain 
felt separately from its cause, creation. 

[93] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

When we work we naturally and necessarily try to 
make the work as pleasant as possible : to get out of 
our creation only the pleasure, and avoid the pain. 
(See 5.) 

That the pain we thus reject remains in the In- 
actual is perhaps best exemplified in the fact of 
envy. All the beings who witness a successful work 
in some degree envy it, and often endeavour to wreck 
it, and thus express the pain it causes them by vent- 
ing their resentment upon its cause. 

Thus around a prosperous nation envy and hatred 
accumulate, and ultimately give rise to wars. In 
envy, in anger, the evil element of pain which is in 
the Inactual becomes active, actualises itself as a 
need to make some being suffer. 

But as every being acts in the same way, trying 
to avoid the pain which it should legitimately bear 
in its creations, there is loosed in the Universe a tre- 
mendous and ever-increasing quantity of suffering 
which desires to be expressed. That is Evil. And 
if that element can capture some being, express itself 
in him, and make him suffer, it appears to us that 
such a being suffers causelessly, which is our con- 
ception of evil. 

19. The Conventions protect against Evil the be- 
ings that belong to them. 

A Convention is a union of beings who have funda- 
mentally similar desires, or desires which can help 
one another in their expression. All stand by one 

[94] 



PRINCIPIA METAPHYSICA 

another, by acknowledging and supporting any ac- 
tion, any creation of any member of the Convention. 
All agree in rejecting pain out of their creation : com- 
fort is essentially the mark of conventionality. And 
as their united strength is much greater than the 
evil loosed by any particular individual act of crea- 
tion. Conventions succeed in protecting their mem- 
bers as individuals. 

They may come to grief, however, as a group, 
when through their systematisation of laws, they 
stand in the way of the further development of the 
Inactual. Then Universes perish entirely. 

But while they last, Conventions are efficient; they 
are specially efficient against such manifestations of 
evil as appear among their members: in a certain 
degree, they prevent such feelings as envy against 
the successful members from becoming effective. 

20. Accidents are violations of Conventional laws. 
Such violations being outside the protection of the 
Convention entail suffering. 

When a being acts in such a way that his desire 
goes, in expression, against the laws of the Conven- 
tion, the Convention refuses to take the expression 
into account. That being is left to fight for himself 
against the pain which comes out of his creation. 
That he might accomplish; but the evil element, at- 
tracted by that pain, which is a beginning of actual- 
isation for the Evil One, concentrates out of the In- 
actual upon the isolated being. And the being is de- 

[95] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

livered to the Evil One, and suffers accordingly. 

That is recorded in the old myth that all those who 
act against the Convention of men (which is moral- 
ity: see 21) go to Hell. It is further acknowledged 
by the fact that men, quite against their better or 
reasonable instincts, make malefactors suffer, torture 
them, or kill them. Joseph de Maistre, in the "Soirees 
de Saint Petersbourg/' thus justifies the old system 
of punishment by torture. Social ostracism against 
defaulters is the civilised form of the same fact. 

But the Universal Convention punishes most, and 
most severely, as it is the most powerful and the most 
precise. Thus a man who steps on a point of space 
where the laws of gravitation do not allow him to 
step in order to express his particular desire, falls, in 
accordance with the law he neglected, and suffers, is 
mutilated or dies, because the Evil One is let loose 
upon him : nothing in the Universe helps him in that 
attempt at an expression which the laws of the Uni- 
verse do not allow. 

21. Man belongs to two Conventions: the Univer- 
sal Convention: which is the Material Convention; 
the Human Convention: which is the Moral Con- 
vention. 

We have seen under 9 three degrees in the concen- 
tration of the Inactual: Universes, men, ideas. For 
each degree there is a language, for each degree there 
is a Convention. The Universal Convention is ex- 
pressed in the laws of matter; matter being its lan- 

[96] 



PRINCIPIA METAPHYSICA 

guage. The Human Convention is expressed in the 
laws of action, action being its language. The laws 
of action are morality. 

This second Convention is much more fragile than 
the first, because far fewer beings have part in it; 
and also because it is comparatively recent. Indeed 
it is not yet quite accomplished, since there are sev- 
eral different religious systems of morality; and since 
in each system a great number of individuals do not 
follow the laws. The systems of morality establish 
themselves as religions, thus claiming, rightfully, 
metaphysical existence, and the power to damn those 
who do not follow their laws. But their power is 
very limited, as compared with that of the Universal 
Convention, because man is only a transitional phase 
between universes and ideas. Also they are inco- 
herent and badly organised, because in the Moral 
Conventions, ideas already exist in some way, and 
cannot be ruled by such conventions. And the Moral 
Convention thus tends to ostracise ideas. 

On the other side, the Material Convention, which 
is so much more precise and powerful, is getting to 
be a cramping force in the development of the In- 
actual. Many things which we desire, and desire 
legitimately, are forbidden us by the laws of matter; 
just as many ideas are unwarrantably forbidden us 
by the moral law. 

22. Man's specific work is to prepare the third 
Convention: the Convention of ideas, which is the 
Metaphysical Convention. 
[97] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

Creating is for man the same as discovering. In 
the Material Convention, in the Moral Convention, 
are the elements ready for the Metaphysical Conven- 
tion. Each successive stage is only a development of 
the previous one, which is too narrow. By the study 
of the two Conventions, man will derive from them, 
at once creating and discovering it, the rule of the 
organisation of ideas. 

He creates the rule, because in him, in his con- 
sciousness, it is evolved. The Inactual creates it in 
him, but man is the highest point of the Inactual (up 
to himself): thus man is the creator; he brings to 
light in himself something which was only in the In- 
actual before, and in that way he discovers the rule 
of the World of Ideas. 

Nevertheless, that rule is far beyond him; he can 
only prepare its coming; by sub-dividing and re- 
solving his desires into ideas, and using what intelli- 
gence, what self-consciousness he has, in organising 
what he sees of the ideas. Man has always acknowl- 
edged his powerlessness to create Conventions for 
himself. He has acknowledged a God as the founder 
of the material Convention, as the Creator of the 
World. He has acknowledged another God, a Mes- 
siah, as the founder of the Moral Convention. A 
further concentration of the Inactual, a further mani- 
festation of even such another God, will be necessary 
for the foundation of the Metaphysical Convention. 
But such Gods are, and work in, Man and being gen- 
erally. 

[98] 



PRINCIPIA METAPHYSICA 

III. PSYCHOLOGY: FALL AND RESURRECTION 

23. Existence entails responsibility. 

A being exists when the outside world takes his ac- 
tions into account. Even if he could ignore his 
fellow-beings, he must be taken into account by the 
Inactual that created him, since otherwise another 
being would be created in his place. But an action is 
only an expression, which the world can take into ac- 
count only on the understanding that there is a force 
behind it, so that when the world builds its own ex- 
pressions on that, that should be kept up by the neces- 
sary energy. Actions are like cheques or notes of 
hand: they circulate as credit for a while, but ulti- 
mately they must be cashed, or there must be the 
possibility of their being cashed. 

Thus the world, in its actions, is obliged, under 
pain of collapse, to demand of each being that he 
should stand by his actions. The world can only 
take into account a being that has the necessary force 
to bear the consequences of his deeds; and sooner or 
later the consequences of an act according to the laws 
of the World-Conventions are thrown back by the 
world upon the author of the act. For instance, a 
man can walk across a street only if he can bear the 
responsibility of doing it : satisfy the laws of gravita- 
tion; he sets to work with the strength necessary to 
move his body across, make a passage for himself 
through intermediary obstacles, be they the air or the 

[99] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

traffic, etc. In this case he has to pay his cheque 
generally at once. But, for instance, he may only 
eat some particular food if he is sure of digesting it, 
and not being killed by it: and there he may not have 
to pay the cheque for long periods, and yet in the end 
be poisoned or endangered. But in any case the 
world cannot and does not take notice of any action 
which has not a sufficient responsibility behind it; if 
such an expression is attempted, the being who causes 
it is crushed, just as a man is under the traffic he has 
been unable to resist or avoid in crossing the street. 

24. Responsibility entails immortality. 

The consequences of any action extend ad infini- 
tum, because any action once performed has to be 
taken into account, more or less, by all the beings 
that are in the world, and by all the future beings the 
Inactual will bring into the world. No being can 
therefore ever completely and for ever disappear, for 
in the scheme of the world there should be a gap, and 
all beings taking, as they must, into account, the con- 
sequences of actions of a non-existent individual, 
would be giving out cheques on a fictive account and 
therefore collapse. Indeed, that partly does happen, 
and thus all beings do die one after another, and can- 
not very long survive anyone they have known. And 
yet the world goes on and does not die, and that de- 
mands the continued existence in some form of all 
the beings that have been in it. Otherwise the world 

[100] 



PRINCIPIA METAPHYSICA 

itself would come to an end and being cease alto- 
gether: indeed, it would have ceased seons ago. 

25. Liberty is the power of expressing one's de- 
sires; it is a concomitant of responsibility; and both, 
of existence itself. 

A being who could not express his desires would 
not know them, and therefore would not have them: 
since the essence of desire is the possibility of self- 
consciousness; and the only way desire reaches self- 
consciousness, or intensity, or satisfaction, is by ex- 
pression. Liberty is therefore what a being gains by 
coming into the world; as responsibility is the price 
he must pay for it. And since a being once come 
into the Actual, creates ever more and more Inactual 
(See 2), and grows infinitely, 

26. As every being is infinite, liberty entails im- 
mortality. 

27. The foundation in men of the World of Ideas 
is the beginning of an immortality which is con- 
tinued in a different order of Being. 

There are in men innumerable desires which are 
not of this world: which arise from no events that 
have taken place in it; which serve no ends connected 
with it. Such are, particularly, all desires of man for 
the beautiful. But every desire has to be realised. 
In spite of all the modal variations of its existence 
(see 28 to 30), it persists and increases for ever (see 
2). If therefore we find in ourselves desires, such as 

[101] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

our need of beauty, which are not to be satisfied in 
this world, we can only deduce (from our psycholog- 
ical experience that all desire is ultimately satisfied) 
that such desires must needs continue to seek for an 
expression after this world. And since the conditions 
of this world are impediments to them, these desires 
will create for their expression a different cosmic or- 
ganisation. 

In reality, none of our Ideas (see 9) find satisfac- 
tion at all in this world; that is why they cannot live 
in it and disappear so rapidly from our consciousness. 
They can only be said to have been born into us, so 
fitfully do they live; and yet we feel their infinitude 
and their force while they possess us; and that they 
need and strive for full life and expression. They 
come into our consciousness as the summits of the 
waves of our desires; but they are new departures, 
and new foundations; and the absolute earnests of 
the life to come; as well as the proof that whatever 
life to come there is shall have no common measure 
with this present one, and be in no way like it; so 
much so, as not to be perceivable even from this life. 

28. When a desire has reached the highest in- 
tensity it is capable of it ceases and falls. Perfec- 
tion is annihilation. 

Thus all desire, in its satisfaction, ceases: be it 
hunger in eating, or love in union : the utmost reach 
of desire is the summit of a curve, and precedes its 
extinction; but 

[102] 



PRINCIPIA METAPHYSICA 

29. A fall is a return into the Inactual, ever un- 
satisfied, which refills the fallen being with new 
forces, and resurrects it. Desire follows an infinite 
rhythm of rise, fall and resurrection. 

Thus our desire of eating soon returns to us; thus, 
although, after contemplating some work of art, we 
go away satisfied, there soon comes upon us the crav- 
ing to see a work of art again. And the craving to 
see another, a more beautiful, work of art, because the 
first satisfaction of our desire has created a new In- 
actual in us: has revealed to us many beauties we had 
not imagined, which we now desire, in a second work 
of art, to see developed and brought out. Thus, after 
eating one particular meal, we find in us a desire for 
a better prepared and organised meal when our 
hunger comes again. The satisfaction of a desire 
thus allays it only for the moment; in fact, it in- 
creases the desire, because it makes it aware of new 
subtleties it was not conscious of before, and which 
it will demand and augment in its next expression. 
Thus not only is desire a series of waves, but an 
ascending series of waves, in which the summit of 
each rises higher than the summit of the preceding 
one. 

30. There are two kinds of fall: sleep and death. 
In sleep, a desire comes back as desire, in the same 
expression; in death, a desire gives up its former 
expression, and comes back on the next plane, sub- 
divided into ideas. 

[103] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

Take sexual desire, which each expression or satis- 
faction calms but for a while, but which at the end 
of our life ceases altogether. It sleeps between each 
expression, and comes back in the same expression 
again. In the end, it dies completely. But this only 
means it gives up one mode of existence and one lan- 
guage. In those of us whose minds are not dead 
before their sexual desire is, that desire subsists, no 
longer caring for physical satisfaction, but trans- 
formed into many ideas: many needs of beauty, of 
intensity, of expansion, of high action. Old men, 
who have perfected the sexual desire and transformed 
it into innumerable ideas in the experience of their 
life, are — when, it must be repeated, they are not 
mentally dead before — much keener and much 
greater, much larger mentally than young men. 
There is in their life a great luminous calm and self- 
possession which makes them in all ages the great 
leaders of men. They already exist in the world of 
ideas. Their sexual desire has been subdivided into 
ideas ; come back to them in new modes of being and 
of expression. 

That state has been ever the aim of the ascetics, 
who have tried to get rid of sexual desire. But the 
only means to get rid of a desire is to satisfy 
it. However, some men have succeeded, even with 
sexual desire; and all men succeed, in the course 
of their life, in transforming many desires into 
ideas. 

[104] 



PRINCIPIA METAPHYSICA 

31. Ideas need a new language; as matter is too 
ponderous an expression for them. The formation 
of the world of ideas entails the death of the material 
universe. 

It has been shown under 21 and 27 that ideas can- 
not subsist in this world of the material language. 
Ideas are too rapid, too flitting, too intense to be 
able to express themselves adequately among the ex- 
pressions of the gross desires of men. But we see 
and experience the end of the desires of man ; whereas 
we are only conscious of the birth of the ideas — their 
mere sprouting into our consciousness. As no man 
can keep an idea more than a few seconds in his 
brain, and even then is exhausted; he keeps only the 
remembrance of that idea, expressed in terms of lan- 
guage; what we call "an abstract idea," the mere ge- 
neric name of it. He no longer feels and experiences 
it as a living fire and a living individual within him- 
self. 

The rhythm of the ideas is infinitely more rapid 
than that of the desires. Desires take a lumbersome 
and slow-moving material machinery to realise them- 
selves: see the infinite trouble and servitude of 
the search for and preparation of food. Ideas leap 
in and out of our brains in periods which are of- 
ten hardly perceptible lengths of time. And as 
ideas come out of desires (see 9), they have to 
wait for each other, during long periods of sleep, 
while the parent desire of the next idea slowly evolves 

[105] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

it. Therefore a proper organisation of the world of 
ideas can only take place when all the desires of this 
world shall have been resolved into ideas, and shall 
have died; thus doing away with the very necessity of 
the material language which so obstructs the expres- 
sion of the ideas. Occasionally in our dreams some 
of our ideas take advantage of the plasticity and mo- 
bility of the dream forms to express themselves; and 
such dreams leave us the remembrance of emotions 
more subtle and intimate than any in the physical 
life. 

32. The basis of all language is the elementary 
vibration of desire, the first rise and fall of the In- 
actual. Thus all language, all expression, is rhythm. 

What language, then, can the ideas create for them- 
selves, once they have abolished matter as used by 
this world? 

We can conceive the basis of all matter and of all 
desire as the first elementary attempt at an expres- 
sion of the first elementary Inactual our world has 
come out of. And that attempt would be, as for all 
desire, a rise and fall ; and that rise and fall, infinitely 
repeated, through the whole world, would be vibra- 
tion : the First Being would feel itself as a vibra- 
tion, and all further beings, since they are parts of 
it, would feel it as a vibration, and would feel it as 
the first stuff they themselves are made of. Upon 
that, different beings would raise different complica- 
tions of vibrations, different rhythms and the Ma- 

[106] 



PRINCIPIA METAPHYSICA 

terial Convention is one system of such rhythms, 
built upon the elementary vibration. 

And any desire being drawn from that first Inac- 
tual can only express itself by modifications of the 
first vibration; therefore all expression is rhythm. 
Therefore the ideas, organising a world of ideas, can 
create a new language out of the elementary vibra- 
tion; they will have the same basis for it as universal 
desires have had for matter. Such a language is 
partly being evolved out of the material language, 
in two ways : consciously, in the arts, which use ma- 
terial forms and copies of material things to express 
ideas, by having their will of such forms; and un- 
consciously, in our dreams, when we use similar forms 
and copies detached from their substratum of matter, 
to express many impossible things, and at times even 
ideas. 

IV. ESCHATOLOGY: DESTINY 

33. Universes also reach perfection and die; in 
the World of Ideas and the realisation of the Meta- 
physical Convention. 

The death and disappearance of the Material 
World is but the prelude to the resurrection of the 
World of Ideas born from that physical cosmos, since 
in the material world the Ideas have not reached 
perfection. The Ideas will, therefore, using the ex- 
perience of the Material World, create an organisa- 
tion and a language which will be fully realised in a 

[107] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

Metaphysical Convention. In this Metaphysical 
Convention the Universe — that portion of the Inac- 
tual which formed first the physical, and after it the 
ideal, Cosmos — will itself reach perfection and there- 
fore fall into annihilation also, as is the way of all 
the Actual. 

34. Nothing is ever lost for the Inactual: and the 
Inactual never ceases from creating. 

The Inactual retains all the experience Being ac- 
quires in its actualisations. This is seen in all the 
generations of Being on the earth, since to the rapid 
creation of a man the Inactual brings the results of 
the experience of countless centuries. Indeed no life 
would exist, did not the Inactual store and reproduce 
all past experiences. Also the Inactual, which is ever 
increased by all actualisations (see 2) incessantly 
casts new beings into the Actual. The very essence 
of desire is the tendency for expression — towards self- 
consciousness, and it is inconceivable that its activity 
should stop. 

35. A fallen world is reproduced in new circum- 
stances: that is among new worlds which the Inactual 
has created during the period of the fall of that world. 

Once the world (see 33) comes to its extinction, the 
Inactual, in its further creations, takes into complete 
account the experience it has gained through that 
world. Therefore, all the worlds created after that 

[108] 



PRINCIPIA METAPHYSICA 

are in a degree based upon the dead Universe. As 
they develop (see 23 and 24) they will need more and 
more the existence of that Universe, until ultimately 
their need will bring the Inactual to re-create it. 
With this external cause of re-creation works the in- 
ternal cause as seen under 29; the Inactual of the 
dead world, increased during its actual existence, will 
also re-create it. But then this world will come back 
under different conditions: it will be responsible for 
all the consequences of its former existence on the 
posterior worlds; and in turn it will have to adapt its 
new course to the new existences that have actualised 
during its sleep. Thus it will remain in essence the 
same: its original Inactual remains as its basis; and 
therefore all beings that have crystallised in it will 
be born anew in it, since it is their Inactual that has 
internally demanded and caused re-creation; but the 
courses of each being will have to be different, since 
the external circumstances will be different. 

Thus the resurrected world will have a new series 
of activities to go through to express more profoundly 
what is in its own Inactual, and to help, in common 
with the new worlds, to express the larger Inactual 
which is behind them all. And we conceive this 
process as being infinitely repeated, in ever enlarg- 
ing units: the group of worlds behaving in the next 
avatar as that one world did by itself; and so on. 

36. Every being reappears in and with its world, 
again and again, in new circumstances. 
[109] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

Thus re-incarnation of separate beings takes place 
in the successive Universes. As Samuel Butler saw, 
all the previous experiences in past incarnations go 
to make more and more rapid and complex the proc- 
ess of physical evolution, so that beings store in 
their bodies all the memories of their infinite past. 

37. There exists for each being a permanent Ab- 
straction, which is its true imperishable essence: a 
plan of that being which life makes real again and 
again in varying circumstances. 

What then remains of each being from incarnation 
to incarnation? A plan which is a germ. Thus in 
the seed of the tree there is the plan of the future 
tree. But any one tree never completely fulfils that 
plan, because the plan is susceptible of development. 
That plan should be represented as a group of lines, 
of directions of desire, which at the foot of a tree are 
close pressed together: and as you follow each fibre, 
it diverges, subdivides and expands, and all fibres 
do so. And yet if at any height of the tree a hori- 
zontal plane be driven across the whole, there you 
have the plan of the tree; and if the plane be cut 
across at several different heights, the several plans 
of the tree thus obtained will be developments, the 
higher of the lower ones. Such a type-plan of a be- 
ing I call its abstraction: it is the only permanent 
thing we can abstract from the being. And it is 
such a plan as, remaining essentially the same, yet 

[110] 



PRINCIPIA METAPHYSICA 

is developed from stage to stage; the living realisa- 
tion of it being thus ever different and yet similar 
and even identical. 

38. There exists a plan of all the Abstractions, 
which is Destiny, but the Inactual is for ever coming 
into the Plan with new creations. 

If we consider one world as one being, the process 
described under 37 is also realised in it; and also 
in a group of worlds. Thus we get to a dynamic 
conception of Destiny, as a sort of scheme in three 
dimensions, as a plan of directions going from the 
past into the future. As being develops, the lines of 
directions diverge one from the other, and branch 
out into subdivisions. 

Besides this development of existing beings, the 
Inactual perpetually brings into existence new be- 
ings, which may be conceived as getting room for 
their existence in the widening gaps of Inactual be- 
tween the diverging lines; and also new beings come 
into the Actual during the sleep periods of the al- 
ready actualised beings (see 34 and 35). 

Thus, from knowing the sum total of the Abstrac- 
tions at one possible moment, it would be possible to 
deduce the general course of events in the future, to 
see the direction of the development of any particu- 
lar being; but it would remain impossible to foresee 
whether, at any particular time, any particular event 
would happen, because of the new creations of the 

[111] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

Inactual which will take place between the v/idening 
lines of the plan, and to which all beings will have to 
adapt themselves. 

39. In Destiny, the will, or desire, of each being is 
completely accomplished. 

This is the necessary consequence of the principles 
from (see 23 to 26). All desires that exist are ac- 
complished. Sometimes they fall, in sleep or in 
death, in their normal course of expression; some- 
times they reach their perfection and disappear in a 
fighting stage. 

A desire which finds itself in unfavourable circum- 
stances (that is, among inimical beings) will express 
itself fully in the attempt to realise itself in spite of 
them: against them. It will fmd in the struggle the 
same intensification of pleasure which it normally 
would look for in ordinary expression — and often 
higher pleasure. Therefore, though apparently baf- 
fled to the sight of the outside world, in itself it will 
be satisfied, and disappear, either in sleep or in sub- 
divided death, in its perfection. 

The perception of this fact is complicated by the 
grouping of desires in men. A man whose desire 
seems denied him, really has generally lost that de- 
sire, perfected as it was in struggle; but the other de- 
sires in the man mechanically go on keeping up the 
former activity, useless now, and apparently a fail- 
ure. A man is a failure, not because his desire has 
not been satisfied, but because he has lost it. But 

[112] 



PRINCIPIA METAPHYSICA 

other inferior desires in him, his laziness, his love of 
comfort, his fear of original effort, are trying to ex- 
ploit at the expense of the world the situation created 
by the existence and then the loss of the first desire: 
those other desires are ineffectually trying to live 
on as though the first had not disappeared. And 
even so, they are only fulfilling the law that all 
desire accomplishes its aim and realises itself in 
destiny. 

40. Destiny is the will of the Total Being, which 
is one: the one striving towards Self-Consciousness, 
and for ever, as its self-consciousness has its in- 
finitude for object, and the Inactual grows with the 
growth of the Actual. 

The one Inactual at the basis of all beings makes 
them all members of one Being. 

We can then conceive Destiny as the Abstraction 
of that One Total Being: a tableau of all the wills of 
all the beings with the necessary willed consequences 
and reactions of their attempt at self-knowledge by 
expression. Destiny is the realisation of Will; and 
there is no antinomy between destiny and liberty. 

And destiny grows, even as being grows, out of the 
Inactual. And no end is possible, because, as seen 
under 2, the Inactual is increased by every actualisa- 
tion. 

The effort towards self-consciousness of the ulti- 
mate first Inactual produces individual beings; it 
groups those individual beings, as they reach perfec- 

[113] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

tion individually, into worlds which then behave as 
individuals, and reach perfection, and are then caught 
up as parts of a group of w^orlds, which in turn 
becomes one individual, and so on for ever. 

But in that ever widening complication of falls 
and resurrections, each being remains, with ever 
larger and different duties; and this destiny, which 
is the realisation of its will, has its laws in 

V. ETHICS 

The duty of man is to be at once the discoverer 
and the creator of Being, by reaching full self- 
consciousness : 

41. To understand the will of the total being, 
and to understand that his own will is identical 
with it. 

42. To feel, in pleasure, the development of the 
Total Being, and to bear, in pain, his own share 
of the suffering of creation. 

43. To act: to express in his languages the Total 
Being; that is, on man's plane, to resolve the desire 
given him into ideas. 

To carry out the Moral Conventions; 
And to lay the foundations of the Metaphysical 
Convention. 



[114] 



COMPLEMENTARY DIALOGUES 



VICES 

The search after pleasure is legitimate. The error in 
vice lies in the fact that the immediate pleasure kills 
pleasure too quickly. Morality is the art of making 
pleasure last. 

Some quantity of vice must be cultivated; without it 
our reason for living might disappear, and our will to 
live forsake us. 

The Psychologist: Avarice comes from a need 
of precision, order, conservation, which is connected 
with formal intellect. Misers belong to the intelli- 
gent type. 

The Poet: Balzac in his Interdiction, points out, 
as a picturesque trait, the resemblance in face and 
manner between the intelligent and kind-hearted 
judge Popinot, and a miser. Balzac gives no reason, 
but records an observed fact. 

The Psychologist: Avarice develops the intel- 
lect: the need not to allow anything to be lost or to 
escape is the basis of the scientific spirit. 

The Dreamer: This need, transmitted by hered- 
ity as an acquired instrument, to descendants who 
are not avaricious, can be applied by them to science, 
politics or business. 

The Psychologist: Avarice is the dominant trait 
[117] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

in the French character; hence the development of 
intellect in the French. 

The Metaphysician: This is a case of a prior 
cosmic desire first acquiring its technique and con- 
sciousness in inferior expressions, and then rising to 
higher ones. 

The Psychologist: Pride is another instance. It 
cannot be explained through the qualities of the 
proud man, who often has no qualities. It is the af- 
firmation of the joy and force of Being in one man 
who becomes the channel of that expression. 

The Dreamer: Fear is another of the cosmic 
forces; either individual or panic fear is generally 
out of proportion to its causes. A kind of disintegra- 
tion of the general Being manifests itself in indi- 
vidual beings. Universal fear precipitates into per- 
sonal units. 

The Metaphysician: It is thus with suffering, at 
a death, for instance; and it is thus with all feelings 
which have no common measure with individual ex- 
perience. The Total Being reaches consciousness of 
its feelings in individuals. Again it is thus with 
faith, which has no adequate cause. 

The Poet: Vices are thus the last — or some- 
times the first — expressions in languages not made 
for them, of desires which will be legitimate in a su- 
perior plane, or have been legitimate in a lower one. 

The Psychologist: Thus selfishness has been a 
virtue in the inferior orders of being; the need of 
concentration which produced individuals. 

[118] 



COMPLEMENTARY DIALOGUES 

Hence love has two forms : a material and a spirit- 
ual one: and lust is connected with love. 

Hence gluttony is connected with taste; and the 
word ''taste'' applies both to physical and to spiritual 
experiences. 

The Metaphysician: Vice is the expression in 
the language of one Convention of desires not be- 
longing to that Convention. 

Thus pride, envy, anger, sloth are legitimate de- 
sires in the Material Convention, being necessary to 
the passing of Universes into human desires. They 
are vestiges of a former order of existence, out of 
place in the Moral Convention. 

Lust, gluttony, avarice, which foreshadow love, 
taste, intellect, are the first expressions of the Meta- 
physical Convention, out of place in the Moral Con- 
vention. 

The Dreamer: All the vices can be followed up 
in the three Conventions. 

The Poet: Plato explained this in the difference 
between the demotic Venus, who is vice, and the 
heavenly Venus, who is virtue; and marked the pas- 
sage from the lower to the higher, the transformation 
of desire into ideas, which makes vice into virtue. 

The Psychologist: Hence the role of vice: it 
settles the arrears of preliminary Conventions; it pre- 
pares the Conventions of the future. 

The Metaphysician: Vice is the expression in 
one Convention of a desire that does not belong to it. 
But accident is the breaking of the laws of a Con- 

[119] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

vention. Therefore, normally, sooner or later, vice 
brings accident: thus lust, gluttony, anger, sloth. 

The Dreamer: In the Moral Convention, the 
wages of sin is death. 

The Psychologist: It happens, however, that 
vice breaks no laws: then it goes unpunished. 

The Dreamer: But then it must have developed 
into intelligence, which frees it from its punishment 
by bringing it into the Metaphysical Convention. 

The Psychologist: It happens also that a vice 
allies itself with a normal virtue and then it is not 
reckoned as against the Convention. Thus lust al- 
lied to love goes often totally — and oftener partially 
— unpunished. 

The Poet: Thus perhaps perfect selfishness might 
protect us from the Evil One. 

The Dreamer: It would then be punished in the 
Metaphysical Convention. 

The Metaphysician: The Moral Convention is 
insufficient, and is only a transition stage. Hence 
the ambiguous position of vice. 

THE PRESENCE OF THE IDEAS 

The Dreamer: Life consists mainly of waiting. 
The success and influence of art comes long after its 
production. That applies also to the most common- 
place enterprises. The greatest part of our time is 
spent in waiting for the results of actions performed. 

Hence the length of death for men: we have to 
[120] 



COMPLEMENTARY DIALOGUES 

wait for the world to reach the point we had reached 
when we died. 

Hence the longer duration of death for the ideas, 
which are infinitely more in advance of the world 
than we. 

The Metaphysician: This shows that the centre 
of gravitation of the Universe is in larger and slower 
masses than men. The Inactual must be given time 
to concentrate after the appeal made to it. 

The Psychologist: It is therefore an error to 
hurry the course of things; hence abortions. 

The Metaphysician: The more subdivided a be- 
ing, the quicker it reaches the consciousness of its 
individuality. Thus men have reached conscious- 
ness before the Universes; and they must sink into 
sleep and death to wait for the Universes to catch up. 

The Poet: Therefore the Ideas have attained con- 
scious individuality before men. 

The Dreamer: The Ideas have existed on the 
Earth before men, just as men now exist when Uni- 
verses do not. The Ideas have existed in the animals 
and in early man ; hence the unsurpassed delicacy of 
prehistoric art. 

The Metaphysician: Tables of individualisa- 
tion : — 

I. Universes: non-individualised. 
II. Men: non-individualised: plants: animals. 
III. Ideas: non-individualised: animal art: bea- 
ver, bee, etc. 

[121] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

III. Ideas: individualised: prehistoric art: pass- 
ing of animality into mankind. 
II. Men: individualised: present stage. 
I. Universes: individualised: to come. 

The Dreamer: The Ideas have been the first 
individuals : they inserted themselves into animal or- 
ganisms and even before that into plants and matter: 
hence the beauty and the marvels of plants : hence in- 
sect and animal instincts — as complicated as the fin- 
est ideas ever born into men's brains. Ideas have 
been neither the creation nor the monopoly of men. 

The Psychologist: But it was the coming of 
the Ideas to individual consciousness which lifted 
man out of the animal stage. There was a period 
when the brain of man was not adequate to the un- 
derstanding of the works of art he created, even as 
insects are used by their instincts. 

The Dreamer: Hence prehistoric art, Egyptian 
art, and others, which their creators did not under- 
stand, giving to them meanings that were not in 
them, associating them with the stupidities of their 
puerile brains. 

The Psychologist: Hence the complicated legis- 
lation of primitive peoples, which does not come en- 
tirely from their brains. 

The Poet: Which was taught them by gods: by 
the Ideas. 

The Dreamer: Hence the awe-inspiring spiritual 
chaos of the origins. As subtle Ideas as ever were 

[122] 



COMPLEMENTARY DIALOGUES 

born were expressed by entirely inadequate intellects. 
Hence the marvellous philosophy of early religion: 
hence the inexhaustible meanings of mythology, 
poems which reach to the deepest essence of Being, 
mixed hopelessly with the unreason, the superstition, 
the logic or the illogicality of the grossest minds. 
Hence also the triumphs of primitive Ideas, which, 
occasionally, explosively, express themselves better, 
and shine more against their background than our 
Ideas, to the understanding of which our brains are 
more adequate, and with which our reason mixes bet- 
ter — to the detriment of the Ideas. Hence the great 
intuitions of the Sacred Books. 

The Poet: We see the Ideas more clearly in those 
periods when they were alone. 

The Metaphysician: Hence a theory of prog- 
ress: the Ideas were there from the beginning and 
have not progressed: but man has progressed. 

The Psychologist: Just as the presence of the 
Ideas created conscious man, thus the presence of 
men will create — is creating — the conscious Universe. 

The Dreamer: Man before coming to the expres- 
sion of his own consciousness, has first been an instru- 
ment of expression to the previous Ideas; to the Ideas 
that had expressed themselves — more or less uncon- 
sciously — in plants and animals. Man first gave 
consciousness to the previous ideas of the plant 
and animal worlds, because he came from those' 
worlds and was overpoweringly surrounded by 
them. 

[123] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

The Psychologist: And his own body was as a 
summary of them. 

The Dreamer: Hence the early beliefs: — 

Totemism: man is such-and-such a plant or ani- 
mal ; natural pantheism : man is the whole of nature 
and experiences the reincarnation and metamor- 
phoses of the insect world, and the evolution of the 
natural species; the unsexed generation of primitive 
organisms; the falls and cataclysms of biology and 
geology; the hermaphroditism which comes before 
the sexes. 

The Psychologist: But primitive mind, reach- 
ing such consciousness, attributed it to man, applied 
to itself the pre-human processes : hence the myths. 

The Metaphysician: Man is first the organ of 
consciousness of the collectivity of Nature; then of 
Cosmic collectivity. Primitive Ideas were the com- 
ing into consciousness of the ideas that had presided 
over the natural phenomena. Philosophical Ideas 
will be the coming into consciousness of the abstrac- 
tions which preside over the organizations of the 
metaphysical world. 

The Dreamer: The mind of man creates no 
Ideas: it is the organ through which the Universe 
reaches such consciousness of itself as is at present 
possible — 

The Psychologist : — but the mind of man warps 
and distorts such consciousness — 

The Poet: — and this creates infinite new possi- 
bilities. 

[124] 



COMPLEMENTARY DIALOGUES 

INDETERMINATION 

"As if they would confine the Interminable 
And tie him to his own prescript 
Who made his laws to bind us, not himself . . !' 

Milton. 
i. e. lav/ binds the Actual, not the Inactual. 

The problem of immortality does not exist where in- 
tellect is not developed: with the animal, the savage, the 
child. It is an artificial problem, and, as such, has this 
characteristic, that it has no solution. 

The Psychologist: Nothing in experience is 
simple. A logical mind could never, for instance, 
have imagined the complication of influences and 
mechanisms of our reproductive or digestive proc- 
esses. 

The Poet: Even our solar system, of which the 
general scheme seems so simple, puts on an incompre- 
hensible complication when studied closely. 

The Dreamer: How then could death be simple, 
since no phenomenon of life is? How could death be 
either pure and simple cessation, or the survival of a 
soul much simpler than the living being? 

The Poet: The two hypotheses are absurd, be- 
cause they are simple, anti-natural. Immortality 
must be something very complicated. 

The Psychologist: Which, consequently, we 
have hardly any chance at all of imagining as it is. 

The Metaphysician: Any pre-existing plan 
[125] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

(either the abstraction of the general Being, or our 
own individual wills) is in n dimensions. The adap- 
tation of the plan to reality \s m n + x dimensions. 
So that the adaptation follows the plan completely 
and yet brings about entirely new things. Thus 
nothing ever happens as expected. 

The Psychologist: Could a man be entirely con- 
vinced, to the bottom of his deepest self, of his im- 
mortality, he would cease to exist : he would fall into 
the absolute and have no reason left for living. 

The Poet: The nature of being is then to desire 
conscious immortality and not to be able to reach 
it; so that it can neither cease nor yet exist for ever. 

The Metaphysician: Which drives us to the 
theories of intermittent life, of returns. 

The Psychologist: Intellect necessarily destroys 
the idea of immortality; feeling perpetually repro- 
duces it. 

The Metaphysician: Which proves the idea of 
immortality to be indestructible. Therefore it will 
be brought into reality. It is impossible to admit 
that being has no aim; that being does not reach its 
aim: consciousness of itself; and consciousness once 
reached, the preservation of consciousness, which is 
immortality. 

The Psychologist: Life is the unforeseen: since 
the unforeseen alone brings pleasure, and pleasure is 
life. Life is the passing of the Inactual into the Ac- 
tual : the coming to pass of the unforeseen. 

Consequently, death can be foreseen, but life can- 
[126] 



COMPLEMENTARY DIALOGUES 

not; nor can the life after death be foreseen: Im- 
mortality is not proportioned to our intellect, be- 
cause life is not. 

The Metaphysician : Therefore the testimony of 
the intellect is not Acceptable against immortality. 
But it is necessary that intellect should show us that 
there are possible actuals for that inactual. 

The Poet: Hence the role of religion and poetry. 
Immortality will not be as we are taught; that it 
can be conceived is all the help that intellect brings 
us. But that help is indispensable. 

The Dreamer: Intellect remains the only judge 
even of what it cannot reach. It judges by default; 
and it judges without appeal, although it cannot re- 
port without appeal. 

The Poet: Intellect is the judge, but not the wit- 
ness. 

The Dreamer: Faith is the self-consciousness of 
will. It remains the basis, and the proof, that the 
aim will be reached. All will is done. But Faith 
cannot tell how. 

The Psychologist: The manner of the existence 
of God, or the manner of our immortality is not yet 
settled for us (for the existence of God postulates two 
terms: God to exist, and us to know it). Therefore 
we cannot know about God nor about immortality. 

The Metaphysician: Indetermination of meta- 
physical truth: It is equally true: 

that we are mortal; that we are immortal — 

that God exists; that God does not exist — 

[127] 



THE THREE CONVENTIONS 

The historical or experimental proof is not attainable 
in either hypothesis; neither hypothesis tallies with 
observed facts. 

The Dreamer: Therefore, if the matter is not as 
yet settled, there comes at the death of the individual 
a period of waiting and of annihilation. Immor- 
tality can only be in resurrection. 

The Metaphysician: We are creating our im- 
mortality and our God, even as we formerly created 
consciousness and man (Immortality being only an 
extension of consciousness, and God of man). 

The Poet: The Metaphysical Convention is still 
to be created. 

The Dreamer: By the will of man. 



the end 



[128] 



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